Anodyne
by notmanos
Summary: Post X2: After Tagawa is almost killed, Marcus and Logan team up to find his assailant, and discover a plot that ties in with both the Yakuza and the Triad as well as Logan's and Tagawa's past.And what has become of Jean?
1. Part 1

Disclaimer: The character of Wolverine & the X Men is owned by 20th Century Fox and Marvel Comics. No copyright infringement intended. The characters of Angel are owned by 20th Century Fox and Mutant Enemy. Bob and his bunch are all mine.  
  
N.B.: Takes place shortly after "X2", and directly after "Duende".  
  
__________  
  
ANODYNE  
  
__________  
  
Prologue - Tokyo, 1980  
  
  
  
"Logan, sweetheart, are you completely out of your fucking mind?" Mariko snapped, as he pulled her into the kitchen of the Dynasty Hotel.  
  
"Probably. But somethin's going down, And I want you out of here as of five minutes ago." The restaurant staff, not accustomed to patrons infringing on their terrain, stared at them in wide eyed shock. Aware he was gaijin, they said derisive things about him and rude Westerns in general, clueless that he spoke the language. But he honestly didn't care if they thought his mother was probably a whore and he was a typical American (very grating, that one - had no one ever heard of Canada?) as he pulled Mariko through the kitchen.  
  
Fats sizzled on grills, water ran heedlessly in the sink as everyone from the cooks in their white aprons to the dishwasher in his hairnet gaped at them openly. No one beyond employees were allowed back here, which is why he was taking her out this way. The smell of people and all the cooked and cooking food was so overwhelming he almost felt dizzy.  
  
Mariko was able to snake her arm out of his grasp, and stood stock still, feet planted and face set in what he knew as "deadly stubborn" mode. At times, it was endearing, but most of the time it just made him want to put his head through the wall. "You tell me what's going on, now, or I'm walking out through the lobby like a normal person."  
  
"There's no time for this," he told her, aware that wouldn't make a damn bit of difference. With a frustrated sigh, he told her, "I saw a man staking out the hotel, and keeping his distance. Something's going to happen, and I want you gone."   
  
This time, when he grabbed her arm, she didn't pull away, but she didn't come along easily either. "Staking out? Couldn't it have been something … I don't know, innocuous?"  
  
"Maybe. Doubtful. I'm not taking that chance." This was supposed to be a routine meeting between family branches, and to guarantee security, he had booked it at two separate hotels, even though it was only taking place in one of them. He didn't inform those involved which was the real one until twenty four hours beforehand. There was no way to completely guarantee safety, but that would have made it as safe as possible.  
  
He had men out front, one pretending to be a doorman, three in the lobby pretending to be patrons, two out back covering the known rear exit. He was sitting in a car parked on the street, a rental, posing as the hired driver waiting for someone in the hotel. It not only let him sit down for the detail - always nice - but allowed him to be less conspicuous, hide his relative whiteness as much as possible, and gave him access to mirrors, so he could see everything around him without having to blatantly look.   
  
He wasn't even sure why he noticed the man across the street at first. He looked like a boy, an average Japanese teenager, lanky, face as pockmarked as the Moon due to acne scars. He wore tan slacks, a white t-shirt advertising Yoo-Hoo, and a blue canvas jacket, and glanced casually at the Dynasty while standing on the street corner, looking around as if seeking an address. Something about him set off alarm bells, but he didn't know what. Still, Logan kept an eye on him in the rearview until he went around the corner. By now he knew he couldn't always reason out his intuition, but he trusted it - it had yet to steer him wrong.  
  
Just six minutes ago, he saw that boy again.  
  
He had changed his shirt - it was now a powder blue one with a picture of Popeye on it - and he added thin rimmed glasses (probably without lenses) and a blue baseball cap to his wardrobe, jacket nowhere to be seen. But it was the same kid. Same acne scars, same loping gait, same posture. He was walking in the opposite direction this time, hands jammed in his pants pockets, and he pretended to look at a car driving by on the street, incidentally glancing at the hotel, never slowing down. But he didn't have to. Logan knew the guy was waiting for something. And whenever the Yashidas were gathered anywhere, there were few choices as to what that could possibly be.  
  
He got on the radio and told his team they were packing up and moving out, ASAP. He left his "second", Matsui, to deal with the rest of the Yashidas and their bodyguards (they preferred working with a Japanese anyways, not an "interloper" like him) while he went up and got Riko personally. Yes, maybe it seemed totally biased, but he didn't give a fuck - he was getting to his wife, and getting her out.   
  
Matsui and the team were getting everybody else out through the known back entrance, the secondary egress, but he was getting her out through the unconventional third - the employees only fire exit in the kitchen. He had Haruki go around back and confirm a clear path before having Natsume bringing the car around into the service alley.   
  
As he dragged her through the maze of startled and offended employees, she said, "I'm not sure if I should be glad you're protecting me, or angry that you're so fucking paranoid."  
  
"Being paranoid is my job, hon." He shoved the fire exit door open and instinctively checked out everything as the warm, moist fall air hit him in the face. It had been an unusually warm September so far; a storm was due in off the Pacific any time now.   
  
It was all clear. The alley was too narrow for a roof sniper, and the few windows in the neighboring building and on this side of the hotel were at awkward angles for a clear shot. Haruki, a stocky bodybuilder type, opened the back door of the sedan for them, and said, "It's clear." He looked and sounded annoyed; he probably thought he was freaking out for no reason.  
  
Logan nodded, and said, "Go see if Matsui needs help."  
  
He nodded tersely and went back inside the hotel as he hustled Mariko towards the idling car. She yanked her arm free again, and looked at him crossly. If he was anyone else, she'd probably have hit him with her briefcase (and she had a hell of a swing). "Logan, I'm not a delicate flower - don't treat me like one."  
  
He sighed, tension making his guts knot up. "I'm not, I'm just doing my job. You have to trust me."  
  
She grimaced sourly, not happy, but relented with a sigh, her shoulders sagging. "I know. It's just it took me two months to even get all these bastards to agree to meet in the same room with each other. And me."  
  
"I know. Well, you had forty five minutes. Any breakthroughs?"  
  
She quirked an eyebrow at him, her dark eyes narrowing in anger, although her lips twisted in grim humor. "We all thought the shrimp sucked."  
  
He shrugged. "It's a start."  
  
She shook her head, pulling strands of her sleek hair out of the dowdy knot she put it in for the meeting. She always tried to look extra prim and "respectable" on these occasions, as if trying to take the sting off being married to her bodyguard, and a gaijin on top of that. A good daughter of the Yashidas, even though she was considered a "traitor" - and much, much worse. "I don't know wha-"  
  
It was then there was a loud, explosive roar, felt rolling through the ground the moment it was heard, and Logan instinctively grabbed Mariko and threw her into the car, covering her with his body as she yelped in shock. The windows of the hotel shattered, sending glass raining down on the car, sounding like pebbles hitting the roof. As Riko scrambled out from beneath him, deeper into the car, Logan slapped the bullet proof glass partition separating the front seat from the back. "Drive, damn it, drive!"  
  
Natsume did as he was ordered, throwing the sedan into gear and speeding down the alley as Logan pulled himself fully inside the car, closing the door just seconds before it would have been ripped off by a trash bin. As he sat up, sinking down instinctively in the seat, he felt his gun digging into his back, and he wondered if he should pull it.  
  
Mariko twisted around and collapsed against him, throwing her arms around him as if grabbing on for dear life. No matter how many close calls she'd been through, they were all frightening; he could feel her trembling as he slipped a comforting arm around her waist. "Did they just blow up the hotel?" She asked, her voice only betraying a quiver near the end.  
  
"Not the whole thing," he replied, aware that might be factual, but it wasn't comforting. He pulled his radio from his waistband, aware he wouldn't be in range very long, and snapped, "Matsui, report."  
  
"Car bomb out front," he came back, the radio cut with static. It almost buried the mild panic in his voice. "Principals okay, secondaries okay as far as I can tell, evacuation almost complete."  
  
Principals were the Yashida family; secondaries were the bodyguards and the staff. And if they had been evacuating the principals through the front - like they were scheduled to - there would have been fatalities, without a doubt. "My principal is away from the scene. Get the rest clear, then help the civilians."  
  
"What?"  
  
"You got your orders. Breaking up, see you at home base." He then turned off the radio and tossed it on the car floor, done with it. Yes, his job was to protect the entire family (or what was left of it), and he did, to the best of ability, but Riko was always going to be his priority. It wasn't just that she was his wife, or that he loved her - it was that she was better than all of them combined, in his opinion. She wanted to make them legitimate, she wanted to play by the rules, but they were happy with the way things were, no matter how many people died because of it.   
  
She hugged him tight, burying her face in his neck. "You knew. How did you know?"  
  
"I didn't; it was a guess. Paranoia isn't always useless."  
  
He felt a tear slide down his neck, trickling beneath his shirt, but Riko was trying hard not to cry. "They're never going to stop, are they?"  
  
"I don't know." But he did, didn't he? They both knew: no, they weren't. As long as there was a Yashida alive, they weren't going to stop the attacks. Every now an d then, he considered - in very low, angry moments - hunting down all the Takabes and taking them out, removing the threat entirely. They thought they were good? He used to be a government agent, and not the good kind, the known, officially acknowledged kind - he infiltrated, he killed, he destroyed, and all with the utmost quiet, efficiency, and lack of trace evidence. They were thugs with cudgels; he could be an assassin with a scalpel.   
  
But that was not him, not anymore, and he was not sinking down to their level. They were dying off on their own anyways, the junkie bastards. It was a true axiom: if you gave people enough rope, they generally did hang themselves. You just had to be patient.  
  
He pulled her tight, nuzzling his head against hers, smelling her hair. Damn him, she was safe, and that was all he actually cared about. "I'm not gonna let them hurt you," he whispered, swallowing down a sudden lump in his throat. It was a vow he had made a thousand times before, but he meant it, each and every time. "They'll get to you over my dead body."  
  
"Please don't prove that," she replied, giving him a desperate squeeze. "I hate this."  
  
"Me too."  
  
As the sedan took a hard right, Logan thought he spied through the tinted safety glass the acne scarred young man in the blue t-shirt, standing in a crowd of gawkers. He craned his neck painfully, trying to spot him again as they sped away, but he didn't. Maybe he wasn't there - maybe it was someone else.   
  
Either way, he was relatively sure it wasn't the last time he'd see him. But the next time he did, Logan knew he would be ready for him.  
  
1  
  
Chicago, Illinois - Present Day  
  
  
  
"I keep tellin' ya there's a mistake," the boy's voice claimed, carrying through the reinforced walls of the precinct house hallways. "Nobody'd spring me." He added, almost as an afterthought, "P-pig."  
  
The cop, a solidly built black woman with close cropped black hair, a handsome face, and a terminally bored expression, rolled her eyes. Apparently she found his attempt to get thrown back in the cell far too pathetic to even bother with. "Next time, kid, say it like you mean it." Officer Ranelle Green pulled Brendan out into the front room, and Logan stood up from the butt numbing bench where he had been waiting pretty much since he got here thirty minutes ago. The amount of bureaucracy was always staggering, even when someone had just been picked up on a d.i.p (drunk in public) and not formally charged with anything. It didn't help that Bren had given a false name when picked up, probably because he was wanted as a state runaway back in Pennsylvania. Lucky for him, no one had matched his picture on a database yet.  
  
As soon as Brendan saw him, he started to back up. But he reeked of malt liquor, and his balance wasn't great; he almost smacked into Green. "Uh uh, no way, I'm not goin' with him."  
  
"Come on, "Kiefer", let's go." For some stupid reason, Brendan had given his name as "Kiefer Lavelle" to the Chicago police department. It didn't take a genius to figure out Brendan probably had a crush on actor Kiefer Sutherland (confirmed by Rogue) - but Logan was still proud he'd been the first one to get it. "Things have settled down at home, and we'd like you back." Logan had claimed to be Brendan's dad, and Xavier - even though he was back in New York - made sure they believed it without question. Xavier could make anyone believe anything.  
  
Brendan scowled, trying to look pissed off, but he just made himself look that much more drunk, eyes so heavy lidded they were almost closing. "I'm not - I don' wanna go back."  
  
"Fine, you don't have to if you don't want to. Let's just go get you a bite to eat, huh?"  
  
"No, I'm not hungry."  
  
Green grabbed him by his shoulders and steered him straight towards Logan, and Brendan's reflexes and strength were so compromised by his sloppy intoxication that by the time he figured out what was going on, Logan had his arm, and was helping hold him up straight. She looked Logan in the eye, and said, "Please get him out of here before the resident crackheads try and kill him."  
  
That surprised him. "He's been givin' lip to the crackheads?"  
  
"Naw. With those red contacts of his, they think he's the devil or somethin'. " As if on cue, there was a bloodcurdling howl from the direction of the detox tanks. It sounded like someone was saying "Get it offa me! Get it offa me!" "Then again, they sometimes call me Oprah. Do I fuckin' look like Oprah to you?"  
  
"No. I'd say Angela Bassett myself."  
  
She stared at him, eyebrows raised in sarcastic appraisal. After a moment, she gave him a small, slightly acrid smile. "You making a move , Mister Lavelle?"  
  
"Never. Just pointing out the obvious."  
  
She shook her head, smile growing broader as she chuckled. "Get outta here before I arrest you too."  
  
Logan mock saluted, and said, "Thanks for letting me get my son. Sorry if he was a pain in the ass."  
  
"He was a gentleman compared to the rest of 'em. Bein' comatose helps."  
  
"Yeah, I've noticed. He won't bother you again." He started dragging Brendan through the cop shop, which was extremely busy considering it was one in the morning, but   
  
on the other hand, that made sense. It was technically Friday now.  
  
As soon as they were outside in the cool, exhaust laden air, Brendan said, "My god. You were crusin' that cop, weren't cha?"  
  
"There's no harm in turning on the charm. Besides, she was cute."  
  
"She shoved me around like the last passenger on a bullet train."  
  
"Just another point in her favor," he teased. Brendan tried to yank his arm away, but didn't have the strength, and almost made himself fall over. He quickly gave up.  
  
It was Chicago, so it wasn't hard to find a fast food joint that was still open. He ordered food on Brendan's behalf, also ordering him a iced tea because he didn't need caffeine on top of the booze. He got himself a tea as well, if only to give himself something to do. There was only one other customer in the place, at a far table by the window, a long haired guy drinking a super-sized pop and eating French fries blindly, glazed eyes staring out the window at the parking lot. Even if he couldn't smell the smoke on him, it was easy to tell he was massively stoned.   
  
Logan was honestly surprised that in the two days Brendan had been gone, he'd only gotten as far west as Chicago. He half expected Xavier to tell him he was in Idaho, or maybe Texas. Although Brendan continued to be surly and disagreeable, when the food was done, he tucked into it ravenously, almost inhaling the first veggie burger he got him. "When did ya last eat?" Logan wondered.  
  
Brendan shrugged. "I dunno. Been a while. Maybe yesterday."  
  
Logan drummed his fingers on the plastic tabletop. "Maybe never. You've been gettin' a self-pity drunk on, haven't you?"  
  
He glared up at him, head lowered over his food like a starving predator trying to protect it from others. "This from the guy who spends all his free time in bars."  
  
Logan shrugged, stirring his iced tea with the straw. There was always too much sugar and never enough fruit flavor in these pre-made teas. "I ain't denying it. In fact, that's how I know. "  
  
"I don't wanna go back. I don't wanna …" He petered off, picking at his fries.  
  
"What? Talk about it? It wasn't your fault. It was a tragic incident, and it's pretty clear Matt had been targeted anyways."  
  
Brendan looked up sharply, sitting rigid in his chair. "What? What d'ya mean?"  
  
"I don't know all the details, but it seems evil vampire guy wanted Matt for his power. How he found out about them, I have no idea."  
  
His shoulders slumped, and he looked strangely older in his sorrow. "Tell me the vampire guy's dead."  
  
"Oh, he's dead all right. I killed him."  
  
Brendan nodded, mildly satisfied, yet still depressed. "Is Matt … is he ..?"  
  
Logan looked down at his drink, wondering if there was any way to be gentle about this. No, not that he could figure. Headlights flashed across the wall as cars drove by on the street outside, traffic hardly diminished in spite of the hour. Life went on for a lot of people; it stopped dead for others, but almost no one noticed. The way of the world. "Yeah, I'm sorry Bren."  
  
He grabbed the edge of the table, and he gripped it tight. Logan wasn't sure if he was trying to tip it (no way - it was bolted to the floor), or stand up, but after a moment it became a moot point. Tears spilled out of his red and bloodshot eyes, and his face seemed to crumble as he struggled to hold back the flood. "It's my fault; it's all my fault. I knew he couldn't last for a minute out there -"  
  
Logan shook his head, feeling bad for the kid. Here it came. "It ain't your fault, you can't blame yours-"  
  
"-Matt just fronted all the time," he continued, his speech starting to devolve into catches and hiccups. "He couldn't - I shoulda protected him -" He shoved the food away, and laid his arms down on the table, letting his head fall there as he sobbed brokenly, his words muffled as he howled, "He's dead an' it's my fault!"  
  
Logan had no idea why he felt a lump form in his throat. Big displays of emotion always made him feel awkward, but this time he felt a strange empathy. He didn't know what he could do or say to comfort him, but after a moment, he reached across the small table and patted his shoulder, aware that was worse than useless. "You can't think that, Brendan. It was not your fault. You couldn't protect him forever."  
  
"I should've found a way," he sobbed. "I shoulda."  
  
He wanted to say something, but there was nothing to say. Logan just kept his hand on his shoulder as Brendan tried to cry out his pain, and wondered why this felt so oddly, uncomfortably familiar.  
  
****  
  
By the time he sobbed himself pretty much dry, and vomited up most of his dinner beside the dumpster in the back of the parking lot, Brendan could almost pass for sober. At least Logan trusted him to hold on as they took his motorcycle back to the motel where he'd gotten a room for the night - he figured there was no way Brendan would be up for an all night drive, not in his intoxicated condition. There was also the problem that he didn't know if Brendan wanted to come back.  
  
Once he helped Brendan into the reasonably clean, cramped motel room, the boy collapsed on one of the narrow twin beds as Logan went around turning on lights. Probably would have been better with them off; it was a really homely place, and it smelled nauseatingly of canned lilac air freshener. "I don't wanna go back," he said, staring up at the ceiling. There was a rusty water stain up there that could have passed as an image of the fat Elvis, or maybe Santa Claus. Pillsbury Dough Boy? Henry Kissenger? At least it was better to look at then the dull paint by number landscape over the bed.   
  
"Where would you go?" He didn't tell him he couldn't. Unlike Xavier, he felt that Brendan should make the choice for himself. Of course, the Prof was just worried he had nowhere else to go, but Logan had a solution for that.   
  
" 'M a street kid goin' way back. I can deal."  
  
"The long time homeless guy says fuck you. You ain't hittin' the street again. I won't allow it."  
  
Brendan looked up at him as he sat down on the end of the opposite bed. "You were homeless? I thought you just moved around a lot."  
  
"I lived in a truck for almost fifteen years, kid. You bet yer ass I moved around a lot."  
  
Just like he thought, that admission actually stopped Brendan's tears for a moment. "You never, like, had a home?  
  
He shrugged, not sure how honest he should be. "Not to my knowledge. Even when I tried the steady work thing, I still lived in trailers or my truck."  
  
Brendan propped himself up on his elbows, his curiosity piqued, tears forgotten for the moment. "The steady work thing? What did you do?"  
  
"I did some seasonal work on the pipeline, using a really good fake i.d.-"  
  
"Pipeline?"  
  
"Alaskan oil pipeline. Illegal - and dangerous - as hell, but the supervisor liked it that way - cheaper to hire illegals under the table than get union approved workers. Then I bluffed my way into a bartending job for a while; the owner was thrilled I could do double duty as a bouncer. But I kind of got bored, and after a while, staying in one place … well, it makes me really itchy. I had to move on. As soon as the winter was over, I left the Yukon and just kinda drifted around ... well, everywhere."  
  
Brendan almost smiled. "You were a bartender? Can you make mai tais?"  
  
He glared at him. "Bartender in the Yukon, Bren. You got beer, whiskey, rotgut, lighter fluid, beer, vodka, beer, beer, and beer. Nobody up in the towns servicing the pipeline or the loggers serve sex on the beach or blue squirrels." It only occurred to him belatedly that he never had told anyone about those brief episodes in his life. Well, there really wasn't anything to talk about, was there? He made better money, overall, in illegal fighting competitions. He had decided early on he wasn't cut out for the daily grind. Even if he wasn't a mutant with some kind of bizarro hit squad after him, he didn't think it would have been for him. He was just too restless and impatient.  
  
"Ah. Too bad." He dropped back down to the bed, and let himself settle. "I've been on floors more comfortable than this."  
  
"I've been chained down to tables more comfortable than this. But hey, you live with what you got."  
  
Brendan frowned at that comment, almost said something, but then thought better of it. He stuck to the lost topic. "I really don't want to go back right now. Maybe later, I don't know … I just need a break, y'know? Time to get my head together." He exhaled like he was being crushed by a heavy weight. "That ain't gonna happen, is it?"  
  
"I dunno. You play by the rules, maybe we can make a deal."  
  
Brendan craned his head towards him, looking at him upside down. It was a very kid thing to do; sometimes it was easy to forget he was still a kid. He bet Brendan sometimes forgot he was too. "Oh? Like what?"  
  
"I might be able to set you up in a place in a L.A. for a month - but only a month. Then you gotta make a decision to come back or not. That cool with you?"  
  
"L.A? Los Angeles?" He said, equally excited and stunned. He shoved himself up to a sitting position, and turned to face him. "Wow, that would be so fucking cool! But … how..?"  
  
"Angel has contacts." Actually, he was in charge of some big evil corporation, but it was probably best Brendan didn't know that right now. "He owes me a favor - possibly several; I've kinda lost track - and I'm sure he can find a safe place for you. But you have to actually do what you said - get your head together, figure out what you want to do with your life. It won't be a vacation, all right? And you have to stay in touch, just so the Prof won't bite my head off. Maybe you could call Rogue on the weekends or somethin', huh?"  
  
"You'd do that for me?"  
  
"I know what it's like to need to be alone, to need your own space. Why d'ya think I don't move into the mansion full time?"  
  
"I thought it was because you actually had a life. And you hated kids."  
  
Damn - he had him there. "Well, that too. But I warn ya, I'm gonna have them check up on you. And if you're gonna get drunk all the time, you get to move in with Rags."  
  
He had to think about it for a moment. "That weird crystal eyed guy who smells like the salad bar at the Olive Garden?"  
  
"One and the same."  
  
He winced, as if Logan had just landed a punch. "That's fucking evil."  
  
"Indeed. So knock off the binging. Alcohol doesn't drown the grief; it doesn't even make you forget. It just gives you a better reason to feel sorry for yourself. Believe me, I know."  
  
"I thought alcohol doesn't effect you."  
  
"It doesn't. It doesn't have to." He reached into his coat pocket, and pulled out the cell phone he'd gotten from Xavier before he left. Okay, it was technically Scott's, but Scooter was giving it up, as too many other people used it, and he was tired of paying the bill. "Now, I'm gonna go tell Xavier what I'm setting up for you. While I'm in the parking lot, why don't you clean up or something, go to bed? I'll see if Wes can get Rags out here by morning. Er, proper morning."  
  
Brendan frowned at him again, eyebrows knitting together. "Why are you goin' out to the parking lot?"  
  
" 'Cause I don't think Chuck would want you to hear the words he's probably gonna call me." He probably wouldn't be that angry at him, but he couldn't imagine him being happy about it. But Brendan was half-demon as well as Human, and he couldn't be vamped even if there were Diego followers still going around vamping mutants. Brendan was safe from that, and probably from a lot of things most Humans weren't. There were upsides to being a biological hybrid.   
  
He had just stood up when the cell started ringing. "Okay, he can't wait to curse me out." He went to the door, phone buzzing away impatiently in his hand, and told Brendan, "It does get better from here. It just won't feel like it for a while."  
  
Brendan nodded, a couple of new tears filling his eyes. They were so bloodshot, it was hard to tell where his crimson irises ended, and the rest of his eyes began. "You are the coolest guy I've ever met."  
  
"Bullshit." As soon as he was out the door, he answered the phone. "I got 'im, okay? He's a little fucked up, but all right."  
  
"Who?" Marcus's deep voice replied.  
  
Talk about the last person he expected to hear from at the moment. "Brendan. What the fuck you calling me for, man? How'd you get the number?"  
  
"Xavier. I called the mansion to see if you were there, he gave me this number. And hello to you too."  
  
"Yeah, hi. How you doing?" Although he wasn't interested in having a brand new conversation, the last time he saw Marcus he was in pretty bad shape. Losing most of your blood did that to a lot of people.   
  
"I'm walkin' and talkin', which is more than I can say for that Berserker. Hey, you up to something major? Got some free time later on?"  
  
That was an amazingly loaded question. "Maybe. Why? Got a gig you need help with?"  
  
"Not a gig per se." He paused, and it was then that Logan knew this was bad. Since when did Marc hesitate. "I could use your help, though, if you've got the time."  
  
"What's goin' on?"  
  
Another pause, too long to be comfortable. "Some asshole just tried to kill Tagawa with a car bomb. I need some help shaking these fuckers down." 


	2. Part 2

"What?" He knew he'd heard him right, and yet he also knew he couldn't have heard him right. "Tony? How is he? Where did this happen?"  
  
"Would ya believe Quebec? He was there for a meeting or some such, and when he was about to leave for the airport, a Yugo did a spontaneous combustion thing outside the place. It was two in the morning, so there weren't a lot of people out - some people hurt by flying debris, no deaths."  
  
"So he's okay?" His heart belatedly skipped a beat. Why did a car bombing sound vaguely familiar too? What a night for déjà vu.   
  
"Yeah, he was in the lobby when it detonated. He got injured by flying glass and shit, but seems otherwise okay. In fact, he called me after they stitched him up, asked to hire you and me as "help"."  
  
"Ehud fell down on the job, huh?"  
  
"I think Ehud just takes care of the plane and the cars, vehicle shit. He ain't with him all the time. In fact, I think he deliberately doesn't surround himself with security."  
  
"Considering the Yakuza hate him, that's not wise."  
  
"I know. But for an old guy, he's got him some big brass balls."  
  
"I've noticed." Logan sat down on one of the cement bumpers in the parking lot, those things designed to keep cars from just driving into the motel itself. It wasn't a busy place tonight - there were only four vehicles in the lot, and lights on in only one of the ground level units, not counting his own. It was just starting to sprinkle faintly, and the strangely wonderful smell of rain of warm, dry concrete waft up to his nose. Made up for all the smell of exhaust and lilac air freshener. "Spider coming with us?"  
  
"Spider bugged out on me - no pun intended. One of his old friends in England died, and he went back for the funeral. He's decided to stay there for now, or at least that's what I pulled from the drunken message he left on my answering machine."  
  
"Self-pity seems to be going around."  
  
"I know, someone should notify the CDC."   
  
Logan looked out at the traffic driving by on the street, then glanced up at the sky. It was too bright in the city to see any stars, even if a thin film of gray clouds wasn't currently moving across the sky. If he listened hard, he could hear the sounds of a hooker negotiating a "date" down the street, someone yelling at some else in Spanish a block away, and some guy was watching a porn movie in unit number seven. When people commented on the "stillness of night", he wondered what the fuck they meant. "Uh, I gotta get something squared away here, but then I can join you in , uh … " he glanced at his watch, but it took a moment for his eyes to adjust enough to the dimness of the parking lot for him to see it. "Six hours, tops?"  
  
"Fine. The docs are making Tagawa stay for observation anyways."  
  
"You in Quebec?"  
  
"Yeah. As luck would have it, I was in Toronto doing a follow up on something, so it wasn't that long a trek for me."  
  
He was instantly curious - what the hell could Marc be "following up on" in Toronto - but he knew better than to ask. If it was relevant, he'd tell him. Otherwise, he was a mercenary, and his jobs were relatively confidential. "What's the info?"  
  
"Royal Victoria Hospital, listed under the name Tom Fujisaki. I'll probably be in the lobby, reading a Steve Martin book, pretendin' to be waitin' for someone."  
  
"Which one?"  
  
"Book? Pure Drivel."  
  
"Good call."  
  
"You read it, huh?"  
  
"I read it. Funny. I prefer his short stories to his novels."  
  
"You read a lot, don't cha?"  
  
"Somebody's gotta do it."  
  
"Yeah." He paused long enough that Logan could hear him take a sip of a drink. Something carbonated; if he was in the hospital now, probably soda. "Do you care about the pay?"  
  
He snorted derisively. "No." Tagawa must have not mentioned the favors he had done for him in Vancouver. But then again, he wouldn't, would he? Tony was not that kind of guy. "Got any suspects?"  
  
"Yakuza. Good bet, probably an Asian guy. So that narrows it down to what, a few million people?"  
  
"Smart ass."  
  
"You asked."  
  
"So I'm guessing you haven't been to the scene?"  
  
He made a negative noise, and Logan heard a sound like settling vinyl. A distant echo sounded like a hospital announcement in French. Doctor Chamblis was needed in the surgery. "Drove near it. Place was crawling with blues, cordoned off, terrorist squad picking the block apart. They think it was an attack rather than a hit."  
  
"An attack? A Yugo? At two in the morning? Unless it was filled with a hundred pounds of C-4 and lobbed into the middle of a Blue Jay's game, I don't see how that would qualify as an attack." He watched the small rain drops bounce on the pavement, turning it from dusty gray to uniform black, and he realized he was getting soaked. It was amazing how little he cared … but the phone was waterproof, right?  
  
"Yeah, I know. But most people haven't been through the wars like we have."  
  
That was such an odd expression. Especially since he knew now that yeah, technically he had been through at least one war personally. (How fucking old was he?!) "What's the name of the hotel?"  
  
"The Du Maurier. Heard of it?"  
  
He snorted derisively and got up, ducking under the covered walkway that passed for an exterior corridor to get out of the rain. "It's one of those fancy ass hotels that I never get within three miles of. I'll find it."  
  
"Why don't you stay in nice hotels? I know from our last paying gig you could afford it. You haven't lived until you get an in room massage."  
  
"Yer a fancy man, Marc. Too fancy for me."  
  
"You're just too busy keeping low to the ground. You live like an escaped convict."  
  
He had never thought of it that way before. Marc was probably right, but he wasn't about to admit it. "I just prefer bein' off the radar, thanks." There was then a weird noise on the phone, a sort of dull "blip", and he nearly jumped out of his skin. "Fuck, the connection's bugged."  
  
Marc scoffed. "You're shitting me, right? Are you that much of a Luddite?"  
  
"I am not a Luddite," he snapped, as the blip occurred once more. "What the fuck is that?"  
  
"Sounds like call waiting. You got someone else calling you."  
  
"I know what call waiting is," he said crossly, shivering involuntarily as the wind kicked up. It was probably a good thing he couldn't get pneumonia. "I just thought it was only on land lines."  
  
"Nope. Is that who you were expecting to call in the first place?"  
  
"Probably."  
  
"Call me when you get in town, okay?"  
  
"Will do. Keep an eye on him."  
  
"They'll kill my meal ticket over my dead body. Sayonara, brother." Marc cut the connection, leaving Logan to figure out how to stop call messaging from bleeping in his ear.   
  
Wonderful thing, technology. Now he knew why he flushed his previous cell phone down the toilet.  
  
2  
  
"Tell me you feel like a complete dick too," she said, glancing up at the second story window. The curtain was only partially drawn, but from his vantage point, there was too much glare off the window for him to see anything but the bright spring day.  
  
"Actually, I was thinkin' this was slightly more productive than most of my usual waiting around," Logan said, inspecting the cards in his hand and deciding to discard a three of clubs. He was hardly paying attention to the game - in fact, it was hard for him to concentrate on anything at the moment, with Mariko's leg pressed up against his beneath the wooden picnic table.  
  
Ryan had many of the "old guard" Yashida family over for a new business proposal, and even though he was technically head of security, he was relegated to the back garden - where they weren't - because the "old guard", as a general mass, loathed him. Mariko was out here with them, even though she crafted the new business plan Ryan was proposing, because women weren't allowed around when the men were speaking business. Ryan wanted her to stick close by, though, so if he got peppered with tough questions, he could use one of the staff to bring them to Mariko for responses. She was good and pissed off about it all, and he couldn't blame her one bit. They were the living embodiment of the family's racism and sexism, loitering in the garden. If they knew he was a mutant, they could probably hit the hate trifecta. Or maybe if they just knew they were sleeping together.  
  
They were still pretending to be friendly to each other in public or around the family, but in a usual way, as Riko had always been his main conduit to the family - the rest of them were just disgusted by his presence in their home, or afraid of him, or both. Otherwise, they were sneaking around like teenagers, and he thought it was kind of funny, in a pathetic way. Sometimes they'd sneak a touch, just a casual brushing against a hand as he walked past, or the small of her back when no one was looking, a type of intimacy that would be confusing but not damning if they were caught. But just the other day, when she walked behind him to leave the room, she briefly let her fingertips trail against the back of his neck, like she sometimes did when they were making love. It sent an electric shiver down his spine that was hard to suppress, and he was so glad he was wearing sunglasses (that was so they wouldn't catch him rolling his eyes at their bullshit).  
  
Of course lately they hadn't been able to meet up anyways - he'd been out late babysitting Ryan, or she'd been working, trying to balance the books legally, pretty much putting the kibosh on their usual late night rendezvous. But it made when they did get together that much more intense - if it wasn't bad enough that they were at that relationship stage where they couldn't keep their hands off each other. As a result, when they got together last Tuesday, he had to go work crowd duty at an airport with only three hours sleep. If this kept up, she was going to kill him. (But, hey, he'd die happy …)  
  
It was starting to bother him, though. He had vowed to himself the last time this happened that he wouldn't let himself get emotionally close to a woman like this again. It almost killed him last time, and he didn't think he could live through it again. Normal people were frail; they got sick, they got hurt, they got ravaged by time. And he could do nothing about it, just stand on the sidelines, impotent and useless, and watch them die. It was time to think of an excuse , to be honest, to leave … but could he leave her to this? The Takabes were getting desperate; if he left now, he'd probably be condemning them (her) to an immediate death sentence. He couldn't live with that.  
  
It was too late. He couldn't walk away, not anymore; he was an idiot, he was a moron, he strongly suspected he was in love with her. He knew he should do something … but what? He kind of hoped he'd snap out of it. Love was fickle, right? Maybe she'd learn to hate him. He was freak, after all, and when it became glaringly obvious he wasn't aging, wasn't getting sick or weak, it was natural to get resentful - or at least that had been his experience. She'd learn to hate him; they all did, if they lived long enough.   
  
She sighed and put her cards down on the table, glancing up at the window. They would be meeting in that room, or, as was usual, drinking heavily and criticizing each other, just like at any other family gathering. "This is stupid. I should just go up there and demand they acknowledge me as head of the goddamn family. Fuck tradition."  
  
"You could. Would they pay attention?"  
  
She turned back and glared at him, the muscles in her jaw tensing, and he was reasonably sure it was going to end here now. But she sighed like a collapsing soufflé, slouching like she was giving up - which she was. "Damn it." The breeze came up, causing strands of hair to fall in her face, while the greenery of the sculpted, meticulously tended garden rippled like the surface of the ocean. He held the cards down, to keep them from blowing away, as he noticed the nodding heads of the roses out of the corner of his eye, smelling their distinctive scent in the air, mixed with the cigarette smoke of the guards on patrol. According to the wishes of their father, the groundskeepers had been instructed to plant a small rose hedge, following his desire for an "English" style garden. But the roses lasted six months, tops, and then they all died. No one was sure why, but Logan always thought of it as a living metaphor: the family was so corrupt at the roots, beauty could only last so long. That was only part of the reason he was so afraid to leave her now - she would either get killed, or get swallowed up by the same corruption that tainted her family. But it was such a painfully arrogant thing to think - he was not the reason she wasn't as warped as the rest of her family; she was not because she was stronger than the rest of them combined. The only one of them worth a damn.  
  
If he left, she would simply die, along with all the rest of them.  
  
She looked at her cards again, her dark eyes clouded with disappointment. "I don't even know why I think I could make a difference."  
  
"Time won't be kind to them," he told her, hating to see her discouraged.  
  
She glanced up at him under lowered eyebrows. "What do you mean?"  
  
"I mean their time has passed. Slowly but inexorably, things are falling apart around them. They are dinosaurs, and they are becoming extinct. You are the new breed, and you will win, if only because they can't. You move with the times, or you die. Believe me, I know."  
  
She studied him, a curious tilt to her head, and sat up a little straighter, a sly smile curving up her pale lips. In the sun, her hair gleamed like black silk. "Sometimes you sound like a wizened old sense in a karate movie."  
  
He grunted in ill humor, but couldn't keep the smirk from his face. "I'm just pointing out the obvious. Personally, I love the fact that they'd pass over the genius with the business degree for the drunken wannabe playboy because the wastrel is the only guy. They deserve to be destroyed, the fucking assholes."  
  
"I thought you liked Japanese culture."  
  
"I respect it, but that doesn't mean I love everything about it. The institutionalized sexism and racism is troublesome. But then again, it's troublesome in all cultures. It's idiotic, putting people in defined categories due to arbitrary things like gender or race or tribe. It just makes it easy to dismiss anyone different from you, or worse, brutalize and kill them." He didn't add "mutantness" to the list, but he supposed she knew he could have.  
  
She discarded the seven of diamonds, openly grinning at him now, her dark eyes bright and laughing. "So you're the bleeding heart sensei?"  
  
"Whatever it takes to get into your pants." He shot back, raising his eyebrows in a mock suggestive manner.   
  
She let out a startled laugh, quickly slapping a hand over her mouth to muffle her laughter, looking around to make sure none of the guards on ground patrol caught that. He winced at that reflexive gesture, but until the family learned to grudgingly tolerate him a little better, and Mariko felt brave enough to openly defy them, they would remain sneaking around in the cover of night. But, as she liked to say, it was kind of exciting.   
  
He felt her leg rub against his beneath the table again, a gesture that passed for eroticism under these circumstances. Feeling her body heat coming through his clothes was strangely arousing though - or maybe it was just being with her. "I wish we could sneak back to my place," he admitted, keeping his voice low.  
  
Her smile faded, her look intense and hungry. "So do I. Got any plans for tonight?"  
  
With a sigh of frustration, he admitted, "I'm getting the entire family back to their respective impenetrable fortresses. I'll probably be out until at least two, assuming I don't also have to wrestle Ryan away from a soapland." He could feel his libido wilting as he imagined putting up with Hachiro's snide comments and Izuki's blatant snubbing.  
  
"I'll be waiting for you," she said, her voice still low, her gaze steady and filled with promise. The space between them seemed to crackle with passion, to the point where he could almost feel like it a static charge.  
  
He studied her, and realized there was no way not to love this woman. He was so utterly doomed.  
  
Logan woke up with a scream stuck in his throat, the sound of water pounding down from the outside.  
  
No, not the outside; Brendan was in the bathroom with the shower on, probably to cover the fact that he was sobbing his guts out in there. Logan sat up, feeling a deep and terrible pain in his abdomen - it was like his solar plexus hadn't just clenched like a fist, but also turned to stone. He struggled to breathe, but found he couldn't; when he tried, he realized he could taste her in his mouth, along with roses and stale cigarette smoke. Even just sitting on the edge of his motel bed, he doubled over, the pain spiking like he had been hit. He choked, feeling like there was something physical clogging his windpipe, and tears made the threadbare brown carpet look like boiling mud.   
  
What the fuck was wrong with him? What the hell was that? He remembered … he remembered not only her but … himself? Did he - was that the other Logan? The one that came before? (Who the hell was Ryan?) His heart was pounding so had he thought it might break his ribs, and he felt like he might vomit.   
  
He'd never had a memory like that before. Was it a memory? Maybe … maybe it wasn't. How did he know?   
  
Why did he feel like he was going to die?  
  
He grabbed his pillow, shoved it hard over his own face, and screamed to relieve the pressure building up inside him. His solar plexus still felt like it was trying to turn him to concrete, tear through his stomach wall and hit the carpet, but now he could breathe. Just thinking the name Mariko made the pain almost blinding, and he struggled hard to choke back the sobs, not sure he was strong enough to stop them.  
  
Brendan heard none of this. He was still trying to pull himself together in the bathroom, and missed all of Logan's little breakdown. He gulped in air, tamping down the sudden wave of sorrow that threatened to drown him. What was this? Why did that … dream, memory, whatever … leave him feeling like he had to start running now?   
  
(-there was something he wasn't supposed to remember - his mind didn't recall it, but his body did. Muscle memory was killing him -)  
  
He sat up, still fighting back sobs that felt like punches, watching his own tears darken the pillow like the rain stained the pavement last night. What the fuck was this? What the fuck was wrong with him? Did Brendan have an ability no one knew about? Was he projecting his sorrow like a rogue radio broadcast?  
  
He didn't need this right now. He needed to get Brendan out of here, and he needed to head to Canada. He couldn't think about this (her), and he knew if he pondered this reaction, this … memory, he would regret it. A puzzling intuition he was afraid not to trust.  
  
As soon as he thought his gut would let him stand up, he did, and went to the door. As luck would have it, it was still pouring outside; he just couldn't tell with the shower going full blast.  
  
He walked out into the rain, and hoped it would hide his tears well enough to escape notice.  
  
3  
  
Brendan was too bewildered by his own pain to notice there was anything amiss with him, which was a relief. But he knew he must not have completely recovered, as Rags squinted at him (and how disturbing was it to learn that a guy with crystal eyes could indeed squint), and asked him if he was all right (or, as he said it precisely, "Yuh allriht?") The claim that he slept bad was easily believed - wasn't it always? Didn't he usually?  
  
Xavier hadn't been overly thrilled with his proposal, but Logan had been able to convince him that Bren was probably bound to run away again if he dragged him back to the school, and maybe this time, if he focused his energy on it as opposed to drowning in forty ounces of self-pity, Brendan could get pretty far, and avoid them all a bit better. He not only had the basic survival skills and street smarts to do it, but there was that whole remembering everything he'd ever seen or learned. That was proof a little knowledge could be a dangerous thing, with certain mutations.  
  
He then hit the road as fast as he could given traffic, and tried to see if he could outrace his thoughts. It was harder than it had ever been, and he wasn't sure why. The more he tried not to think about it, he did, and the more he tried not to dwell on her, he did. He got so distracted, he initially missed the exit he needed, and angrily forced himself to think about nothing but his destination. He owed Tagawa, whether he ever called him on it or not; he had to focus and be there for him, or the next time those assholes after him could score a direct hit.  
  
(But shouldn't this be old home week? He used to be a bodyguard. Hell, he used to work within a crime family - he should know them like the back of his hand. If he could remember anything more substantive than the fact that he was hopelessly in love with the family's daughter, and they hated his fucking guts. So much so that they eventually killed her because of it.)  
  
Those thoughts made his solar plexus clench again, and he had no fucking idea it could do that. But when it hurt, it hurt amazingly bad.  
  
He chased good weather over the border, and it didn't get overcast again until he crossed over into Quebec, the mean temperature staying the same, but the humidity dropped enough that he felt colder. He didn't call Marc right away; he found the Du Maurier instead, deciding he needed to give his mind something else to dwell on.  
  
The street was open again, but then again it had to be; it was a downtown area full of shops, and the car bomb had honestly done minimum damage to the neighboring structures - the force looked as if it was all directed at the front of the gothic style, twenty story hotel, judging from the clear tarps spread over where the large front windows and glass fronted doors used to be. That called for someone who knew exactly what they were doing; this was not a random Yakuza blowing up a handy car. This was a person who worked specifically with bombs and explosives; this was an almost surgical bombing. If Tony had been outside the hotel, or even one his way out at the time of the explosion (all that flying glass in the doorway would have julienned him like potatoes), he would be very dead. Either it was on a timer, and Tony was just late enough to miss it, or … or it was a warning? Perhaps. He had to talk to Marcus about that.  
  
Glancing at the newspapers in a mini-mart on the corner, he learned that the English language paper was speculating that Quebec separatists were responsible, while the French language newspaper was speculating that radical "outsiders" were to blame. Although he knew they meant the rabid non-separatist groups, the French paper was much closer to the truth of the matter. But, of course, they were both ultimately wrong. He did love how politics bled into everything, whether it belonged there or not.  
  
Of course the cops and bomb squad investigators had taken away any evidence worth investigating, but there was still a lingering scent in the air that Logan spent minutes trying to figure out. Of course it was almost gone, and nearly lost in the sea of scents: exhaust, people and all their chemicals (perfumes, deodorants, soap, fabric softener, dry cleaning, cigarettes), the scent of fresh baked goods and coffee from the bakery across the street, the odors dragged along by the equipment used by both police and the bomb squad, as well as the hotel clean up crew now that they were allowed to try and neaten the area up. But there was a lingering scent, tantalizing, oddly familiar … plastique? C-4 was now the explosive of choice, but that was still an old favorite. His stomach clenched in another sickening wave of déjà vu, and he wondered if you could honestly be assaulted by your own memories, even if they weren't fully formed.  
  
He went over to the bakery and got a mocha and a croissant (well, he wasn't hungry, but maybe if he ate something the hideous cramps in his gut would cease, or at least taper off), and kept an eye on the hotel's shattered, broken front from a window table as he called Marcus. "I'm here," he said, as soon as Marc picked up. "Outside the Du Maurier."  
  
"Anything?"  
  
"Professional job, maybe a warning. Curiously concerned about collateral damage." His mocha was still too hot to drink, so he tore an end off the croissant and chewed it, ignoring his stomach's uncertain flip-flop. They really did make kick ass croissants in Montreal - you had to give them that.  
  
"As in making lots?"  
  
"As in causing almost none. That's just not the kind of consideration you get from your casual bomber."  
  
Marc paused, but he was just considering that. Even over a slightly static-y cell phone, he knew Marc believed him. "So that's why you think it was a warning?"  
  
"One of the reasons, yeah. How's Tony?"  
  
"Cool, as in ice cold. He's out of the hospital, and we're at a private airstrip right now, in his jet. You need to get here ASAP - he thinks he might know what was behind this."  
  
"Can you give me a hint?"  
  
"Not really, he hasn't filled me in on the details. But he did want me to ask ya if you have some time to kill."  
  
Okay, that sounded bad. "Why?"  
  
"'Cause if you're goin' with me on this, you need to know there's gonna be some traveling."  
  
"To where?"  
  
Marc's pause made his stomach clench again. "Hong Kong."  
  
Logan watched his reflection in the window, saw its eyes widen at the prospect. "Uh, he's aware that's right next door to the Yakuza playground, right?"  
  
"Right. But he thinks they - the Yakuza - have good reason to want to punch his ticket now." Marc paused and sighed, but he sounded vaguely amused. "He wants to meet them half way and get it over with, one way or another. He said he's too old to sit around and wait for some power hungry thugs to kill him."  
  
Logan smirked and shook his head, not sure if Tagawa was crazy or just possessed of some of the greatest chutzpah on the face of the Earth. "He's fucking nuts. I like him."  
  
"Me too. You in?"  
  
He exhaled slowly and looked down at his hand as he reached for his mocha. It looked like his fingers were still trembling a little. "Hell yeah. Where's the airfield?"  
  
Getting it over with sounded just like what the doctor ordered. 


	3. Part 3

4  
  
The air field wasn't far away, and it didn't take that long for him to get there; he managed to beat the rain. He wasn't sure it mattered. He felt curiously numb, but decided that was probably a blessing.  
  
Tagawa's jet was easy to spot, and as he drove up, the large, golem like figure of Ehud was waiting beneath the shadow of the left wing for him - or just keeping a belated eye out for danger . It seemed like too little too late, but he didn't bother to say it, because the guy must have known that. There was nothing worse for a bodyguard than to fuck up on the job - and who should know that better than him?  
  
That thought made his solar plexus clench again, so he stopped thinking that way.  
  
Marcus opened the plane door for him, and he looked pretty much like his normal, muscular self, dressed all in black, save for his distressed brown leather bomber jacket. He had a small, pale diagonal scar on the right side of his face, about an inch away from his eye (or, in this case, his goggles), a souvenir from his tangle with the Berserker. Just by the way his eyebrows dipped, he knew Marc was squinting at him. "You okay, bud?"  
  
Was it that fucking obvious? "Yeah, just tired. Dig the scar."  
  
He scowled as if aware he was kind of changing the subject, but admitted, "Yeah, it's kind of cool, isn't it? Mucho macho. I'm kinda hopin' it doesn't completely heal. Makes me look tough."  
  
Logan snorted sarcastically. "Tough? If you looked any tougher, you'd be beef jerky."  
  
"Damn right, motherfucker," he agreed, leading the way into the plane, with an exaggerated walk that was half pimp caricature, and half duck walk.   
  
In spite of himself, he laughed. "You're such a spaz." It was good to know Marc was back to normal, in spite of it all.  
  
"Jealous."  
  
He went back to walking like a normal person as they entered the spacious, azure and ivory hued main cabin, where Tony sat in one of the plush blue seats. He looked as supernaturally dignified as he always did, dressed in a neat, stylish tan suit that only he could pull off (anyone else would look like a bargain basement competitor for the UPS man), paired with a white shirt, missing a tie. He had a few fine scars across his left cheek, mostly healed over and far too shallow to have gotten much attention, but there was a butterfly bandage on his left temple, covering what must have been a gash large enough to require stitches. He didn't get up, but he did bow anyways, and say, "Konnichiha, Logan."  
  
"Konnichiha." He bowed more formally, then added, "How are you doing?" Only after he asked it did he realize he'd said it in Japanese too.  
  
"I'm well, thank you," Tagawa replied in the same language. "What about you? You look a little pale."  
  
Oh, was that what was tipping everyone off? "I didn't sleep well."  
  
"Do you ever?"  
  
He shrugged. "Not really."  
  
"You're talking about me, aren't you?" Marcus joked.  
  
"Sorry," he said, reverting to English.  
  
"Yes, I'm sorry Marcus," Tagawa agreed, jumping back to English as well. "It's simply refreshing to speak to someone with Logan's fluency."  
  
"Hey, I know. He's a natural born translator." Marc threw himself in a plush chair across the cabin, and said, "So, what's the skinny?"  
  
Tony gestured for him to take a seat, and Logan did, across from Tagawa, so they were both covering alternate angles. (He was already thinking of this as bodyguard duty?) With a sigh, Tagawa folded his hands in his lap (one of them was sporting a bandage as well), and began. "Several months ago, my brother Tetsuo died. I heard of this long after the fact, as we were far from close - he was the first one to disown me from the family. Anyways, Tetsuo never married, and had no children, as well as no will considered legally binding. So my remaining family decided to take it to court and get his estate transferred to them legally, so the state would not take it. That was a mistake."  
  
"The state took it anyways?" Marc guessed.  
  
While that was his first guess, it also didn't fit; it didn't bring them to here. "The lawyers found you," Logan opined.  
  
Tagawa gave him a small, approving smile. "Yes indeed, they found me. Estrangement only counts in a court of law if it was done legally; I was asked if I wished to pursue my brother's estate. I said yes, only to keep it from the rest of my family. As you might imagine, that didn't go down well."  
  
"They want to kill you," Logan sighed, running a hand through his hair. Why did this sound so familiar?  
  
Family was always a nice idea. But, in his extremely limited experience, when things went seriously bad, no wanted to kill you quite like family. Familiarity really did build contempt of a high order sometimes. And in a family where everything was sacrificed to money and power, loyalty didn't exist. (He did sound like a sensei in a karate film.)  
  
Tagawa nodded tersely. "I won the estate. They now want my head on a silver platter. Oddly enough, they knew the ruling was coming down in my favor before my lawyers could notify me."  
  
Marc grunted knowingly. "Money talks, bullshit walks. They paid somebody, or they got someone on the inside."  
  
"I suspected as much," Tagawa admitted emotionlessly. He was certainly a cool customer, or maybe just accustomed to this shit after so long. His dark, contemplative eyes locked on Logan. "You think the bombing was a warning?"  
  
He nodded. "The scene was just too neat. Bombings are messy, awful things; even if you're an expert, an X factor can throw it all off. A shift in the wind, someone running into your set up - the car, in this case - someone inadvertently walking up and fucking it up or setting it off prematurely. But I'm convinced this guy, whoever he is, is good; he planned it as perfectly as you could. If he honestly wanted you dead, you would be."  
  
"It still could be a timer misfire," Marc interjected, playing devil's advocate.  
  
Logan shrugged. "Yeah. But if he just added a half brick more plastique - or got a car with a bigger gas tank - it would have sent that entire front window wall flying into the lobby at mach speed. Anybody not behind something made of thick lead or adamantium would be pulsed like a tomato and blender. "  
  
"Adamantium?" Tagawa said curiously. "You mean that theoretical metal alloy?"  
  
Marcus snorted like he was making a joke. "Not so theoretical, Tone." Logan felt a sudden shock of fear - he wasn't going to just tell him, was he? He figured Tony guessed he was a mutant, but he'd never told him about that - but Marc took a Glock out of his shoulder holster, and popped the ammo cartridge out, giving him a glimpse of the silver bullets inside. "Full adamantium jacket. These rounds could punch through a lead lined bunker."  
  
Tagawa's eyebrows raised considerably, and that was a hell of a reaction from a guy who almost never outwardly reacted to much at all. "They've mastered the synthesizing process? How? It's an extremely volatile metal."  
  
Marc slammed the cartridge back in the gun, and slipped it back in his holster. "I have no fuckin' idea. I pulled these bullets out of a base where … let's just say they were a secretive group with an illegal agenda. The bullets are theirs, and I have a very limited quantity; I have no idea where they got them or how they were made. All I know I is I could shoot a helicopter out of the sky with these babies; they are the atom bombs of bullets." Tagawa considered that with his usual measure of serene calm, dipping his head to the side. "I could even drop Logan with one of these. Well, for a little while." He winked at him, making a joke, but then he stiffened and looked slightly embarrassed. Logan didn't know why, until he realized that he was thinking that the last time - to Marc's knowledge - he got hit with an adamantium bullet, it was when Leonie was killed. His solar plexus seemed to knot up again, and Logan glanced down at the sky blue carpet, determined not to think about it.  
  
"I'm sure they're very impressive," Tagawa agreed. "If you have an extra, I'd love to study it sometime."  
  
"Precisely how big is the estate you won?" Logan interjected quickly, wanting to get off this topic as quickly as possible.  
  
A confused look briefly clouded Tagawa's serene face as he realized Logan didn't want to talk about this, but he adapted quickly. "In a monetary sense, it's worth about one point two million dollars American."  
  
Marcus let out a low whistle. "Not exactly chump change."  
  
"And since people will kill you for fifty cents, a big incentive."  
  
"People also try to kill Fifty Cent," Marcus noted, deadpan.  
  
"Keep your day job. So you say it's worth over a million - most of it isn't cash, I presume."  
  
Tagawa shook his head. "He only had twenty thousand dollars in his two bank accounts that were officially included in the tally. Most of his holdings are in property."  
  
"In Japan?"  
  
"And Hong Kong. His most expensive holdings are there."  
  
"Hence why you wanna go there?" Marc guessed.  
  
Tagawa dipped his head towards him in a small, polite nod. "I'd like to liquidate those holdings as soon as possible. I have no interest in the money, I simply wanted to keep my poisoned family from enriching their own coffers."  
  
Poisoned family. Logan felt a slight chill, as he realized that fell very close to what he (no, the other Logan) thought about the Yashidas in that dream (memory). "But you had to know that would fuck them off royal. It's worse than if you wanted the money; that they could probably understand. But you wanted ito nly so they couldn't have it, and they have to know that. It's gotta be eating at them."  
  
"I admit … I probably let spite get the better of me. But there's something else I should warn you two of, before you agree to this job."  
  
Marc slumped back in his seat with a sigh, equally wary and weary. "Don't tell us - your family is a bunch of cyborgs from the future with cannons for arms?"  
  
At least that got a small smile out of Tagawa. "Oddly enough, I think I could deal with cyborgs. No, I've heard rumors - only recently, therefore officially unconfirmed - that before his unfortunate death, Tetsuo had worked out a business arrangement with the head of a powerful Triad gang working out of Hong Kong."  
  
"Triad?" Marcus repeated in disbelief, sitting forward again. Although his shoulders were slumped, his back was tense. "You're saying the Yakuza and the Triad are working together?"  
  
"I'm not sure."  
  
"What could bring them together?" Logan wondered, thinking aloud. Although both were Asian, the Yakuza and the Triads played by similar but fundamentally different rules, and weren't know for cooperation - it would be like the Crips and the Bloods suddenly deciding on a custody sharing arrangement of South Central, back in the day. "A common enemy? And what did your brother die of, anyways?"  
  
Tagawa gave him a strangely appraising sidelong glance. He knew Tony liked Marcus, respected him - but Logan couldn't shake the feeling that, while he obviously liked him too - he was constantly testing and measuring him for unclear reasons. Did he not completely trust him yet? Did he know something he shouldn't have? "In this case, it's rumored not to be a common foe, but a common profit. When the Taliban took over Afghanistan, they basically destroyed all of the opium poppy crops - what they didn't they used to fill their coffers. With the opium supply cut down to a mere trickle from alternate sources - mainly Pakistan and China - it became quickly obvious that fighting over such a limited supply was a waste of resources. They didn't work together, but basically got out of each other's way.   
  
"As soon as the Taliban was ousted, the poppy fields exploded, once again feeding the market. Now there's lots to go around, but supposedly Tetsuo showed at least some local bosses how much more profit there was in cooperation than in continual fighting for a share of the illegal drug market. It's large enough that everyone can get a piece of the pie."  
  
"The Gandhi of organized crime?" Logan speculated, with a sarcastic snort.  
  
"You could say that. If Gandhi was overweight, balding, Japanese, and had a weakness for pin stripes."  
  
"So, we have to assume the Triad and the Yakuza are working together to maximize the opium trade going through Hong Kong?" Marc said, simply laying it out all on the table. "Does that mean they're friendly enough to turn against you as a whole?"  
  
Tagawa considered it, then grimaced painfully as he shook his head. "I do not know for sure. It's a possibility I thought I should warn you about."  
  
"Shit," Marc breathed. Seemed like an understatement. "I'm gonna need to go get my rocket launcher."  
  
"You didn't mention how he died," Logan pointed out.  
  
Tagawa gave him that tight smile again, like he had passed another test. His eyes were bright but otherwise unreadable. "He liked to sample his own products sometimes, and the fat bastard had a heart attack."  
  
"Overdose?" Logan asked, although it wasn't really a question.  
  
He dipped his head as an acknowledgement. "As the coroner so tastefully put it, "death by misadventure"."  
  
"Could it have been a well concealed murder?"  
  
"Certainly. There's simply no way to prove it."  
  
"Oh, great," Marc interjected. "So if the Triad and the Yakuza working together ain't bad enough, you could be actually popping yourself into the middle of a secret vendetta?"  
  
Tagawa's brow furrowed as he considered that, the crow's feet standing out in the corners of his eyes like bas relief. "I had not considered that before. I would like to think not. Perhaps this is more dangerous than I previously considered."  
  
Marc shrugged, and slumped back in his chair. "That's why they pay me the big bucks. We just get in and get out, quick as we can, and maybe we can eliminate some of the bloodshed. Might have to charge you a bit more for expenses, you know. Bullets."  
  
Although that seemed to trouble him slightly, Tagawa made a spreading gesture with his hands that Logan knew was conciliatory. "Whatever you need. Expense is not a problem."  
  
"I know, Tony, that's what I love about you." Marc tilted his head towards Logan. "What d'ya think, bud?"  
  
Although he glanced in his direction, he kept the corner of his eye on Tagawa. "I think we're gonna need a bigger boat." If nothing else, he knew that Marc would appreciate the 'Jaws' reference. "Yeah, I'm in. I've got no love loss for the Yakuza. The Triad want to stand in my way, that's their risk."  
  
Tagawa smiled approvingly. Logan had the inexplicable, paranoid feeling that Tony had been counting on him to say just that.  
  
5  
  
She walked into a sunlit kitchen, redolent with the smell of blackberry cobbler and tomato soup, suggesting her mother had been going through what she liked to think of as her sudden domestic phase. It occurred somewhat randomly, but usually near holidays, or when her grandmother was due for a visit. It was always a strange thing to see her analytical librarian mother, whose general idea of home cooking was opening a bag of frozen corn to throw in the canned chili, go all domestic diva, running around the kitchen pulping home grown tomatoes in a blender or making dough for a pie. When she was a little girl, she used to love to help her, as Jean had caught on early that her solo cooking skills left much to be desired. She was quite possibly the only girl to ever fail home economics.  
  
The sunlight coming through the blinds left stripes like jail bars on the parquet floor, and she had the most curious feeling of dislocation. She wasn't supposed to be here ... but where was she supposed to be? She couldn't remember. But then again, she couldn't remember arriving either. She was simply here, as if the beginning and the end of the entire world was encapsulated in this strangely stagnant sense of time. She was always here; she had never been anywhere else. There was nowhere else.  
  
The sliding glass door was open, the screen door in place, and she knew from the smell of slightly charred meat wafting in from the backyard that her father was barbecuing. She headed out, sliding back the screen - which always stuck just a little, for reasons no one had ever been able to determine - and saw her mother and father sitting at the translucent plastic circular patio table, with what looked like a platter of cooked meat on the table between them, and set aside glasses containing Bloody Marys. But there were several things wrong, although she couldn't put a name to them immediately.  
  
Their backyard near Watertown, New York, was relatively lush, but nowhere near as landscaped as this, or as wide as this, with what looked like a reflecting pool wedged between large sculptured hedges, leading to a small grove of pear and dogwood trees. Shrubs and wildflowers sprawled on all sides, with pine trees as tall as redwoods defining the outer borders, and it occurred to her this was a garden for a mansion, not a small, split level suburban home. Also her father, Doctor John Gray, was not bald, but now he appeared to be, the sunlight reflecting off his barren scalp like a halo. Her mother, Cathleen, did not have long white hair either - it was naturally curly, and a reddish-brown color her Dad used to say was "roan", if only to gently annoy Mom. But not today.  
  
And since when did they ever drink anything stronger than wine? Even then, it was reserved for special occasions, not backyard barbecues. Children's laughter seemed to echo from the trees, and she immediately thought of her siblings playing out in the forest … except she had no siblings. She was very much an only child.  
  
As she approached the table, her eyes focused on the platter in the center of the table. It was burnt, charred beyond recognition, but oddly shaped; long and thick, curling up at the end, the meat breaking into five separate divisions at the end. Sunlight glinted off the ends, and what she assumed to be the knife left in the meat was revealed to be some odd utensil curving out of the meat. Three odd utensils, curved silver knives unaffected by the heat that burned the flesh, and as she leaned in for a closer look, a startlingly familiar but out of place voice said, "That's the bad part about passion, isn't it? It cuts both ways. Love can be hate faster than most people think, especially if it's a battle for survival. But the best weapon is the one you least expect."  
  
Logan's arm. Logan's baked, severed arm was on the plate.  
  
She took a step back, repulsed, when the thought hit her: 'I did that. I burned him alive and tore him apart to make sure he couldn't survive'. "No," she said aloud, deeply confused. 'He wouldn't stop. It was him or me.' That couldn't be true…was it? She wasn't sure.  
  
"Well, you haven't, not yet anyways," the voice said again. She looked up sharply, and she saw Scott standing on the lawn, dressed in chinos and an open necked white shirt, the sleeves rolled up, his sunglasses completely black. He raised a glass towards her in toast, and she saw he had a Bloody Mary too. "Salud."  
  
It took her a moment to remember Scott didn't drink. "What's going on here?"  
  
After taking a hearty swig from his glass, he shrugged, his lips still wet and slick with blood. (What? No, no, that was tomato juice … right?) "I'm meetin' your parents, honey pie. Isn't it all just sweet and cozy?" He gave her a smug, blade sharp smile that didn't seem to fit his face, and tossed his half full glass over his shoulder. It thudded to the lawn like a ten ton weight.   
  
She glowered at him. "You're not Scott."  
  
"Oh, I most certainly am not. Who the fuck is that?"  
  
That forced her to remember. Why was it so hard to think? It was like slogging through chest high mud, the dense kind that threatened to hold you fast and drag you down like quicksand. "If you don't know who he is, why do you look like him?"  
  
He scoffed, and for the first time, she realized her parents were frozen like statues. They weren't real at all. "Don't ask me. I'm empty; I'm just a mirror for your subconscious. I have been told whoever's bothering you the most - whoever's giving you a major case of the guilts - reflects in me. But how would I know? That's not my department."  
  
"I have no guilt over Scott. Why should I?" Did she? She didn't think so. She didn't think she'd ever felt less guilty in her entire life.  
  
"Again, not my department, sweety-doll. But, could be the old you. Maybe I should say the other you. There's a lot of yous in there."  
  
"I have no idea what you're talking about."  
  
He shook his head and continued to smile in a way that was deeply patronizing. "You're kinda new at this god thing, huh? Let me clue you in - in the beginning, they're all a little nuts. Some of 'em never grow out of it. Great power honestly fucks you up. But you don't know that, 'cause you're in it. And no one, while they're in it, realizes how much it's fucking them up."  
  
Now she was starting to remember, just a little, and it made her furious. "I am not fucked up, Bob. Maybe you are -"  
  
"Whoa-ho, I am not Bob! In fact, I am so not Bob you probably couldn't comprehend it. But, to be fair, Bob would be the first to admit he's really fucked in the head - shit, he lets people call him Bob! That's no name for a god."  
  
"Lets people? So that's not his real name."  
  
"Oh no, not at all; not even close. Have you ever read or heard any myths involving a god named Bob?" He then crossed his arms over his chest, and looked at her over the tops of his sunglasses … except there was nothing there, not even eyes; just a tangible void she could feel from this distance. It seemed to radiate cold like a glacier. "But that's not what you really want to know, is it, hon-bun?"  
  
"Stop with the stupid names. What do you want from me?"  
  
"Want? I have no wants. That's a corporeal thing, or a coherent energy thing. Not my bag."  
  
She thought she felt her stomach grow leaden and cold, but she wasn't completely certain she had a body. "Am - am I dead? Is this some kind of hell?"  
  
He let out a throaty chuckle, and seemed genuinely amused. She wanted to smash his face in. "No, you're not dead, not yet - how could we being having this conversation if we were? I have no interest in dead people. But hell ..? That's little more than a state of mind, so you tell me."  
  
Gods, he was a foul creature. She wondered if there was some way she could hurt him. "No, you tell me - what are you?"  
  
"I am nothing," he claimed, throwing his arms wide. "I am the balance of the universes. Death gods aren't the only elementals."  
  
"You're not making sense."  
  
"Of course I am. You know your physics, yes? Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, well, every thing has an opposite as well. Gods can kill each other, but in a Darwinian battle for survival, one god could theoretically be stronger than all of the others combined - and what would happen then? That's no good in a manifold plane. Now, grasp this: energy cannot be created nor destroyed, simply transformed - another basic law of physics. Gods are, in general, coherent energy ; they can be dispersed, lose cohesion, but not be destroyed … technically."  
  
She shook her head, angry that he was probably being obtuse on purpose. "You're saying there's a connection, is that it?"  
  
"Yes indeedy do. There had to be a way to balance out a truly omnipotent god, and there has to be a way to translate that energy into a different, risk free form." He pointed at his head, as if playing 'Spot The Loony' with himself. "Voila! Me. Sometimes I'm called an "eater", yet I have many names- but none that I call myself. Myself is a loose concept to me - I just am. I take out the pan-dimensional trash. Not 'cause I wanna, you understand. Does a fish want to swim? Okay, bad example. But you get what I'm saying now, don't you?"  
  
He was insane, and that just added to his chilling presence. "You're saying you kill gods."  
  
He let out a sharp, short bark of laughter. "M'dear, I don't kill anything. I hunger, and I transform. Do you understand? I need energy to survive, and the only energy that's ever really any good belongs to you things. In other words, darling - I eat gods for breakfast. I have no ill will towards you, it's not at all personal, but I need to feed. And I was given a "go out to lunch" free card, courtesy of Osiris. I'm sorry to say you're the fruit cup. Wait, no, I'm not sorry at all. But I bet you are."  
  
She scowled, trying to use her rage to cover her fear. "So you're killing me because Bob ordered Osiris to do it?"  
  
"I'm not technically suppose to kill you, just burn off some of your power. Still, I don't take orders, certainly not from the likes of Bob, and neither of them are here, are they? Sure, I like Sy; we elementals have a certain reciprocity thing goin' on, know what I'm sayin'? But hon, it's just you and me right now." He grinned, showing the yawning void inside of him. "Ya gonna fight me? I hope you do. I'm the psychic equivalent of a Chinese finger trap - the more you fight me, the more you become irrevocably stuck. Every god has their limit. Let's say we find out what yours is, huh?"  
  
She started backing towards the door, even though she knew she was in his mind - or maybe he was in hers, overriding her control. She really had no idea, as she had no true sense of self; she felt curiously cut off from herself, surgically removed from her own mind. But she wasn't going to give up just because this psychopathic, sentient black hole told her she should.   
  
Still, she thought she might have figured out one of the names the other gods called him: Ragnarok.  
  
She wondered how Bob would feel when she finally fed him to it. 


	4. Part 4

6  
  
For a small plane, it had an awful lot of room.   
  
There were a couple of separate cabins, like rooms in a house, austere yet plush - a living contradiction. Logan went to 'rest" in one of the smaller ones near the tail, while Marc and Tagawa worked out some last minute details, and they took off. Logan took one look at the tilting world beneath them as the plane rose higher about the almost pastoral outskirts of Montreal, and then closed the blue window shades before collapsing in one of the soft azure recliners.  
  
What was wrong with him? He knew he couldn't be sick, but he almost felt like he might be. And why was Tagawa starting to set off alarm bells in his head? The guy had been nothing but a major help to him. He was not one of the bad guys. And what precisely did he think he was doing? He was going off to Hong Kong, only for the chance to get in a big, bloody, hard fight, just to get his mind off things.  
  
God - he needed therapy. Where did an amnesiac killing machine mutant go for therapy?  
  
"You can't possibly be trying to create a dark little hidey hole in a fantabulous private jet," Marcus exclaimed, entering the cabin. He started raising window blinds, letting in the bright, pale light of the sun seen through a filter of gauzy clouds. "Oh, here, the official stuff, if we need it." Marc tossed what looked like a worn leather checkbook in his lap.   
  
In fact, it was an extremely authentic looking passport, with several official looking authorization stamps on it, and a small headshot of him - it looked like the same one Marc used for his photo i.d. when they went down to Santo Marco. This one made him a Canadian citizen named Logan Chase. "Chase? Aren't you in a punny mood?" He remarked, shutting the passport and shoving it in his inner coat pocket.   
  
"Come now. A man of action like you deserves a big action name. And I've already taken Buck Plankchest."  
  
He knew he was trying to make him laugh, but he could barely manage an anemic smile. "Not Carstairs Mahoney?"  
  
"That no good bastard only rents cars." Marc stopped to open a panel that was set flush with the upper bulkhead, and after a moment, Nirvana started thudding out of hidden speakers around the cabin, although Marc - surely in deference to him - turned it down to an angry background purr. He turned to look at him with that teeth baring, smart ass grin of his. "Can you tell I've been here before?"  
  
"Where are the exits located, Steward Drury?" He wondered why Marc had picked this song, or if it was just coincidence. Currently, the chorus was "If I die before I wake, hope I don't come back the same". It bothered Logan that he could identify with that.   
  
Marc shrugged, and threw himself in a chair across from him. "Wherever the plane cracks open on impact."  
  
"Yer a hell of a steward."  
  
"Just tellin' it like it is."  
  
"Are we brothers again?"  
  
"Naw, I figured that would be pushin' it, considering we both work for the same private security firm."  
  
"Oh, do we? What is it?"  
  
"Shrike Security. I figured our slogan could be 'For all your mad bastard security needs'."  
  
This time, he did smirk. "If he was alive, Shrike'd be foaming at the mouth to think we're using his code name as a cover."  
  
"He'd just be foamin' at the mouth in general. He seemed to be that kinda guy."  
  
"Mad bastard."  
  
"Yup." He sighed, and said, "You wanna beer? It's gotta be five o'clock somewhere."  
  
"Sure, why not?"  
  
"Great, go get me one too." He gave him that Cheshire Cat grin again, and said, "I ain't goin' to get you one unless you tell me what's wrong."  
  
"What the fuck's that supposed to me? Nothing's wrong with me, 'cept I can't sleep for shit."  
  
"Yeah, that part I got. But you look like shit. And not just "I can't sleep for shit" shit, but "beaten silly with a frozen mackerel" shit."  
  
He just stared at him. "Frozen mackerel?"  
  
"You have a problem with frozen fish?"  
  
"Are you on drugs?"  
  
Marc gave him a truly ugly look as he sank down deeper into his chair, his posture one of total ease and relaxation - which Logan knew he couldn't trust. He took on a casual posture as camouflage for how alert and on edge he really was. Marc was just too good, and Logan just knew him too well. "Man, c'mon. How've things been since … well, shit, what do I pick? Leonie's death? Yasha's? Virtual end of the world?"  
  
What could he tell him that would make him go away? "Angel told me the world almost ends on a regular basis. Most people just don't know about it."  
  
"Angel's a strange man. Vampire. Whatever. Look, don't avoid the subject."  
  
"I'm not." He sighed wearily. "I'm tired, okay? I figure, if I keep movin' I won't have to think about it. And right now I don't want to think about it."  
  
"But all yer doin' is thinking about it."  
  
"How the fuck do you know? Are you a mind reader now?"  
  
"I don't have to be. The last time you wallowed, I had to pull your ass of some redneck booze pit in the middle of the vast Canadian nowhere. I ain't doin' that again."  
  
"I never asked you to in the first place." Tool's "The Grudge" was now pounding through the speakers, and Logan wondered, slightly annoyed, if Marcus had put on a special "angst" mix tape.  
  
"Thing about bein' friends, Logan, is you don't have to ask. And look - we got hours before we touch down. Hours. Hours and hours. In a confined space, in mid-air. Do you know how crazy I could make you in that span of time? Try and attack me, I give you a dose of venom, and make you sit there and take it for about an hour or so. So, throw me a bone if you want me to go away and leave you alone. "  
  
He glowered at him, aware it would do no good at all. "I hate you."  
  
"No you don't. We're brothers … most of the time. You'd better start talking, or I'm gonna recount my last major break up. And I know you can't wait to hear all the gory details."  
  
"You're an asshole."  
  
"Takes one to know one." He sat forward, elbows on his knees, resting his chin in his hands in a posture of eager anticipation.   
  
Logan shook his head and pulled back the blind over his window, glancing out at the clouds. It was a white carpet on pale blue, and could have been wads of filmy cotton in front of a soundstage screen, if he squinted and tilted his head. It was easier to look out there than to look across from him. He knew Marc knew a little about this, but not all the details - or any. "Wanna know what's bothering me now, Marc? I had a wife, named Mariko, who was a member of a Yakuza crime family. She tried to make it go legit, and I was her bodyguard. She was murdered by her family, who teamed up with their bitter rivals to do it, as they decided they didn't want to go legit. After she was killed, I … I hunted them all down. I killed every single one I could find. And this all happened before Weapon X gotta hold of me." He let the blind shut again, and looked at Marcus, who kept his expression neutral, if not nearly blank. "Bob tried to make it easy for me, you know - all this stuff about temporary insanity and not bein' in my right mind … although I think he was on to something there; how could I be in a right mind when I'm not sure I ever had one? But, truth is, I think I've always been a killer. Weapon X just made me a better one."  
  
Marc sat back, something in his posture expressing the horror he refused to show on his face. (Very funny - the singer of Tool was shouting at him to "Let go!") After a moment, Marcus exhaled a long sigh, rubbing his hands on his knees as if to dry them, and finally said, "I'd have hunted them all down too; I've told you as much. No wonder you said you didn't like the Yakuza. Do - do you remember this?"  
  
"No. But Bob found records of it. It seems the KGB had some interest in the Japanese underworld, and the incident ended up in their records. They called it Bloody Friday. Apparently I killed more Yakuza members in that one day than anyone else ever had, before and possibly since. What an honor, huh?"  
  
"I don't think you're a killer, bud."  
  
He snorted a sharp bark of a laugh. "Weren't you paying attention?"  
  
"Did you love her?"  
  
That question briefly threw him. "I - I think - yes. Yes I did." He almost said 'More than my life itself', but that was way too dramatic. Still, as far as he knew, she was all he wanted in life; nothing else came close.  
  
Marc caught the hesitation, and canted his head at a curious angle. "You remember her?"  
  
"No. Just fragments. I have pieces of her that I can't fit into a whole. Random shards of memory that really don't connect."  
  
"So you know you loved her. And you know why you did what you did."  
  
He narrowed his eyes at him, feeling a surge of anger and despair that was chilling familiar. Sometimes his mind seemed to mix them up; sometimes his mind seemed to be only waiting for something to lash out at. "I participated in one of Japan's largest gangland killings - and I did it all myself! It explains nothing!"  
  
"We all have limits; we all have a point where we snap. That doesn't make you equivalent to a psychopathic killer. And, as the resident amoral guy, I think I know one when I see one."  
  
He knew Marcus was just trying to make him feel better, but he had no idea why. He shouldn't be made to feel better about this. "I fit the definition of a mass murderer, you know."  
  
"Yeah, well, technically, me too."  
  
"It's different."  
  
"Is it really? You're acting like you woke up one day and decided to murder these guys in cold blood. We all know you didn't. And I can't imagine what they must've done to you before they got to her. You know it must have been bad."  
  
He shook his head. "I don't know anything."  
  
"I know you're torturing yourself over this, and you don't need to. You can't change what happened back then, nor do you even know the whole story. Until you do, stop judging yourself so harshly."  
  
He stared at him in disbelief. "I will never know the whole story - how could I?" 'I'm afraid to remember', he thought, but didn't dare say.   
  
"Then why torture yourself over the unknown? You got lots of known stuff to torture yourself about." He flashed him that toothy, smart ass grin of his. "Speaking of which. I got enough snazzy body armor for everybody, so if we're goin' into a situation that could end up all "Wild Bunch - Samurai Style", I want you to wear some."  
  
He shook his head, vaguely relieved that the topic had been switched. "Don't need it, and you know it."  
  
"You do need it. Yeah, bullets can't kill you, but enough can put you down, and then you have to heal up. Besides that, dude, they fucking hurt. Why put yourself through that pain if you don't need to?"  
  
" 'Cause maybe it's better to feel pain than to f eel nothing at all. At least I know I'm still alive."  
  
Marc stared at him for a full minute, back ramrod straight. "Hokay. When we get back to the States, remind me to give you the number of a good therapist. 'Cause, man, no one as naturally scary as you should ever be this depressed. I actually know one who's a mutant …"  
  
"So you're at least admitting I'm crazy."  
  
"Fuck you. Get out of the dark ages, man - no one thinks yer crazy if you see a headshrinker anymore. Hell, almost everyone does. Besides, think how good it will be to talk to someone who doesn't really know you, won't care, and can't call the cops on you."  
  
"It bothers me that you're trying to talk me into therapy."  
  
"Fine, be that way." He stood up, and for some reason, held his hands apart while tipping his head at him. "I think your chest is a wee bit narrower than mine. Still, I'll give you one of my flak jackets."  
  
"Narrower?" He scoffed. "You know how hard it is for me to get shirts that fit right?"  
  
"Cry me a river, white boy," he teased, then added bombastically, "Besides, I'm the 'Merican here. And nobody argues with America. You're just asking to get your pansy Canadian ass invaded, that's what you're doing."  
  
Logan shook his head and looked down at the carpet, finding it difficult not to smile. Damn him. "Go away before I hit you."  
  
"Spoken like a true Mountie lover," he chided sarcastically. As he did in fact leave the cabin (thank God), he started singing along with the Foo Fighters song now caroming around the cabin, but he sang it like a lounge singer, clearly amusing himself. At the door, he announced dramatically, "Don't mess with the U.S., moose fucker!" and left the cabin.  
  
Logan couldn't help it - he burst out laughing. And he knew that Marc meant for him to do just that.  
  
The man was completely insane. That's probably why they got along so well.  
  
7  
  
Although, on the outside, the landscapers strived for beauty and warmth, they couldn't conceal that this was clearly an institution.  
  
Flowering lilacs of purple and yellow clung to the sides of the building, attempting to hide the "silent" security grid that rimmed the building, the sensor nodes that were the most visible part of the network looking like low garden lights that would never shed any visible illumination. As she walked in, the overwhelmingly sickly sweet scent of the flowers threatened to give her a headache. She sneezed twice, trying to rid the offending odor from her nasal passages.  
  
She encountered no trouble whatsoever from the security or attending staff, as they were already acquainted with her. They thought her to be a government security official with what she felt was the preposterous name of Marilyn Wu, and she had the badge, pass, and security clearance to prove it, of course.  
  
But it was all bullshit. Too bad they'd never know it.  
  
Her heels clicked sharply on the cream tiled floor as she cleared the first security point, then the next, having only to flash her pass and wait for it to be scanned for approval before a nurse would release the lock on the inner door. She tried to ignore the smells of clinical disinfectants, laundry detergent, and piss, and suddenly longed for that lilac scent.  
  
The funny thing was, they always knew Weapon X was the key to the botched Operation Underneath project, just not in the way it played out. Admittedly, the operation in British Columbia - after a very promising start - was an unmitigated disaster. He was getting a lot smarter about their tactics, making them all wonder about his memory regeneration rate. How much did he remember, and should they be worried yet? Projection models said he wouldn't even regain half his lost memories for sixty eight years, but he seemed to be progressing much faster than anticipated. The problem, she supposed, with computer modeling a healing factor as volatile and essentially unpredictable as his.   
  
Weapon X's trail was cold by the time they picked it up, and his erratic travel soon gave way to speculation on his mental health (which had always been extremely dubious - many blamed the fragility of his mind after his second mental breakdown (or was it third?) as the catalyst that led to the Alkali Lake disaster), although the pattern was easy to crack, and - in retrospect - so obvious, two people were demoted because of it: Weapon X was searching the graves of the patsies he killed long ago.  
  
The general idea back then was to let the stupid thugs steal the prototype, and use them as a vector to introduce the nanites to the general populace. But a chain of unfortunate coincidences - and weather - led to a collision somewhere in a nowhere mountain town: stupid, puny humans, against the wayward and brain-fucked Weapon X. Even with the firearms, they never had a chance.   
  
But they didn't know they had run into Weapon X, not for a long time. That backwater police chief bitch lied her fucking ass off in the official reports, and no one believed it - like she honestly could have taken them all out by herself when they were packing Organization weapons - but they had slightly bigger problems at the time. First of all, why hadn't the nanites spread out, at least among the hick cops? What happened there?  
  
As it turned out, the experiment was a failure. The nanites didn't weaponize except under certain laboratory conditions that couldn't be replicated in the field. R and D should have known of that long before it was released, but someone probably made up a bunch of bullshit to cover their own ass and get a promotion. Even though they were failures, the nanites still functioned at a basic level, as builders. If any scientist or engineered somehow found one, they'd risk losing a huge technological edge; they had to find out what became of the nanites, confirm they were in no danger of being discovered by someone smart enough to know what they had.   
  
Years and years of waiting and investigation turned up the unfortunate connection to their prodigal son, and they couldn't believe it. What had they ever done to deserve luck that bad?  
  
(Okay, okay, it was a rhetorical question.)  
  
The final insult, though, was not only did Weapon X have no fucking idea what they were after, but he came prepared for them. No one was sure how he had killed Ryan still; his brain just seemed to implode, neurons burst as if tiny balloons subjected to a barrage of bullets. The theory was one of his telepath friends had hit him, but the only one they knew of that was powerful enough to do that - Xavier - wouldn't. He was a goody two shoes from way back, and would never kill when he could simply stun. Still, there was the pretty boy - now pretty much referred to as "Aussie Bob" in e-mails - who remained an unknown but lethal quantity - it was assumed he was responsible for the destruction of the base and personnel down in Mexico. Had they not read the "Do not engage" memo put out after Reaper's unfortunate transformation?  
  
Then, Weapon X eluded them, until they found trail fragments. He got help from someone, but it was not clear whom. And it was absolutely humiliating that that dumb shit had figured out what became of the nanites before they did.  
  
Okay, if his records could be believed, he wasn't always the dumb shit he was now. Back in his Canadian Intelligence days, he was something of a small wonder: although records of his official education were spotty at best, not only was he a ludicrously efficient polyglot (that had to be some kind of secondary mutation, or related to a primary; it was unclear what the slightly enlarged portion of the "language" center of his brain could conceivably be related to), but he supposedly had a genius level i.q - well, back in the '30's. The test was considered a fluke - even then, no one could believe he was that smart - so they tested him again, and somehow he ended up higher than he was before.  
  
But that was before they started working on his brain, rebuilding it, fashioning it into something more useful. As smart as he supposedly was, he had been unstable - he had a sharp temper that could surface at unusual times, seemed a tad paranoid (did he ever completely trust anyone? There was little sign of it - although that made him a perfect spy), and obviously concealed much about himself and his nebulous past. There had been some speculation he'd had at least one nervous breakdown before he ended up in Intelligence. Wasn't that always the way, though? Genius i.q. never equaled perfect; in fact, it usually guaranteed you were getting an "eccentric" asshole at the very least.   
  
So, the former smart guy turned dumb, brain scrambled fuck figured out that one of the stupid junkie moguls must have ingested the nanites somehow. Following his cold trail of logic, they discovered the empty grave of Cole Mullaney, a loser out of Kamloops who had nothing but an impressive juvenile record of vandalism and break-ins. The grave hadn't been disturbed for some time, so it wasn't likely Weapon X removed the body; he wasn't known for his finesse anyways. The nanites were builders, and may have reverted to their base programming - could they "repair" a human completely? Did they have a man living again due to the nanites, or were they simply keeping him going without technical life - a mechanoid zombie? There was only one way to tell - find Cole Mullaney.  
  
That was not as easy as finding his grave, but at least they figured it out sooner, and didn't need Weapon X to lead them there.  
  
Someone going by the name Cole Aldrich Mullaney had been arrested several years ago for shoplifting and scuffling with security guards in an outlet mall in Winnipeg. But rather than be sent to jail, he was eventually committed to a psychiatric facility, as a psychological assessment determined him to be borderline psychotic - certainly delusional, probably schizophrenic. He seemed to insist everything wasn't real, that this was Hell, and no one was actually Human. He also insisted he knew this because he was actually dead. Because no family could be found, and he was judged to be legally incompetent, he ended up here, at this depressingly modern insane asylum (except they weren't called that anymore - they probably had bullshit names like psychiatric recovery facilities or some such crap) in depressingly old fashioned Winnipeg. Thanks to a combination of computer glitches and general ineptitude, no one had ever figured out that the Cole Mullaney here was one who died in the middle of nowhere, unnoticed and not missed by anyone, over a decade ago.  
  
They got access to his treatment records, and there were few shocks. He was on heavy anti-psychotic medications, but they didn't seem to help him in the least; he still believed nothing mattered, because this was Hell. Therapy was useless, as he was non-responsive when he wasn't outright hostile. It was noted he seemed to recover well from physical injuries, and he often seemed to be cold, although he himself was unaware of temperature, whether in himself or in the room. Physically he seemed all right, but there was an usual phenomenon noted around him - delicate or unshielded electrical equipment could have sudden bursts of static, or fuzz out almost entirely until he went away.  
  
They took this to mean the nanites were still functioning. Whether or not they had brought him back to life, or were simply keeping a corpse going, was still up for conjecture. Some of the eggheads thought the nanites could have gotten his brain "running" again - perhaps not to high capacity - but rather than giving him life again, was simply precluding decay; meaning he was, in fact, a dead man. He just didn't meet anyone's accepted term for it. But it was accepted that, whether he was living or dead, he would keel over if the nanites were removed.  
  
According to the records of his death, he died due to a 'high impact blunt trauma to the cranium' - in other words, Weapon X bashed in his skull with the butt of his own rifle. Considering a good portion of his skull was shattered (Weapon X was strong, but even stronger when crazed), and he'd been cut open during the autopsy and had at least some of his brain matter leak out, if not get removed, it was impossible to guess how long it took the nanites to rebuild him. A year? Possibly more? He could have been in his grave for up to five years before the nanites completely reanimated him. He was only put in this facility seven and a half years ago.  
  
She was met by the officious Doctor James, a tall, slender, balding man with just enough remaining carrot red hair to make her think of that old scientist Muppet - what was his name? Beaker? Doctor Beaker had been the staff head honcho she'd had the most contact with, and she got the disgusting impression that the oily fossil was attempting to flirt with her. After a greeting where he held on to her hand longer than necessary, he went on to tell her how Cole had been isolated in an interview room, per her request, and only lightly sedated. The latter part disturbed him the most, as he felt it wasn't wise for him to be in the same room with him when he was off his thorazine, but she assured him she would call for help the instant she thought she needed it. She wouldn't need it, though. Cole might, if he wasn't a good little boy.  
  
Beaker put a hand on the small of her back as he led her to the isolation ward, and it took all her will to resist snapping his arm off at the elbow. Creepy letch - she bet he stole drugs for personal use at home, in lieu of an actual social life. He'd probably been around crazy people so long he was crazy himself. That often happened to the caretakers of the unhinged; it just wasn't mentioned much.   
  
The door sealed behind her with a heavy, pneumatic thunk as she entered the blindingly white room, where nothing but an unpainted wooden table - bolted to the ecru tiled floor -sat with two hard backed plastic chairs a color that could be described charitably as moldy lime. Slumped in one chair was the pathetic idiot known as Cole Mullaney.  
  
His skin tone was an unhealthy oatmeal color, but it was impossible to say if that came from spending most of his time inside a loony bin for seven years, or because maintaining correct pigmentation was low on the nanite's priority list. His hair was a messy ruin, dark as chocolate pudding, looking as if the last time he'd seen a barber, the wannabe stylist was not only legally blind and drunk, but had a terrible case of the shakes. He was looking down at the floor, his back and shoulders rounded in a posture common to the utterly defeated and the hopelessly sedated, and the shapeless gray-green shirt he wore made it impossible to judge how heavy he was. According to his file, he should have been thirty eight, but she bet he probably hadn't aged since he died - the nanites would probably consider that look a general template.  
  
He did nothing as she came in - never looked up, never moved - even when she pulled back the empty chair, and its rubber capped legs made a sharp noise against the floor. He was only doped up on lorazepam - he shouldn't have been that out of it.  
  
She pulled the surveillance blocker out of her pocket - it looked like a thick pen - and clicked it on before placing it on the table; it was specially shielded to be protected from unintentional electronic interference from the nanites. She waited for the tiny flash of green light, the all clear, before sitting down and starting her spiel. "Mister Mullaney, I'm Agent Marilyn Wu, I work with the Department of Defense -"  
  
"Bullshit," he mumbled, sounding half asleep. He finally looked up, and his face was technically young, although dark shadows ringed his eyes thickly, making him look not so much weary as dying on the vine; his blue eyes were glazed, but she wasn't completely sure it was due completely to the drugs. He looked like he had checked out long ago, and whatever was left behind was not thrilled about it.   
  
She folded her hands together on the table top, and attempted to give him a reassuring smile. She was certain it didn't work. "You're right, Cole. It is bullshit."  
  
He blinked rapidly, looking at her with his head canted to the side, as if he was afraid he hadn't heard her correctly. "What?"  
  
"It's complete bullshit. All of it; all of this." She waved her hand at the walls, indicating the world outside this hermetically sealed coffin. "This is Hell. But you broke the rules, Cole - you don't tell the others about it. They think they're still alive, still in control of their lives. You can't spoil the joke."  
  
He continued to stare at her blankly, mouth slightly agape, suspicious barely registering in his eyes. There wasn't a single blemish, not a single remaining scar to show where Weapon X had terminally fractured his left orbit (eye socket), sending bone fragments into both his frontal and ethmoid sinus cavities and into the brain beyond, killing him almost instantly. Weapon X was a very efficient killer, when he remembered his training. "Y-you're playing me," he said, although he sounded far from certain of that. People tended to want to believe when you told them what they honestly wished to hear.   
  
"Absolutely not - we're done with that. You died sixteen years ago, in a British Columbia mountain town called Bear Creek. A man you didn't know - or probably even suspected - grabbed your stolen rifle, and caved in your skull with it. Do you remember?" He started panting, making a strange noise that sounded like 'huh huh' as he remembered, and seemed to decide she must be on the level. She didn't want to give him too much time to dwell on it, so she went on, trying to press her advantage. "He was code named Wolverine - he's a mutant, and a killer. He's finally been sent to Hell, and I've been sent by the "powers that be" here to make you an offer."  
  
He stared at her, hollow eyed and perhaps a little frightened. "Wh-what kind of offer?"  
  
He was raised in a good Catholic household; she imagined he was still very superstitious at his core. "We're very impressed by your tenacity, Cole. You do this favor for us - "kill" and otherwise torment your killer, Wolverine - and we'll let you leave."  
  
He considered that, staring blankly at the wall behind her. "But why? Why do that?"  
  
"Torment Wolverine? Well, to be quite honest, we don't like him. Even Hell has its limits. And we think you've suffered enough for your crimes on Earth. Don't you think you have? Consider him a parting gift to you."  
  
He continued to stare at the vast nothingness behind her, but she knew she had him. There wasn't much left to do, simply convince him that the Devil had imbued him with powers to recover from any injury, and that while it was Hell, it was in his best interest to avoid those who refused to believe this wasn't Earth. He would be a malleable and cooperative terrorist, and, if they could outfit him correctly, more than a match for the recalcitrant and bullish Weapon X.  
  
After all, how did you kill someone who was already dead? 


	5. Part 5

8  
  
He walked into the foyer of the mansion, to find it all deathly quiet - too goddamn quiet for a school full of kids.  
  
The t.v. flickered in the lounge, a blind eye silently repeating an image of film, but he couldn't completely tell what it was from the hall. Logan stepped closer for a better look, with a nagging feeling it was important, but suddenly sensed he was no longer alone.   
  
He spun on his heels, and saw that the floor had been replaced with red glass, and Yasha stood twenty feet away, wrapped in a sheet of red silk that looked like blood, and seemed to meld into the floor, like it was all part of the same thing. But the walls seemed to be receding far behind her, melting into a blinding white light that was not only painful to look at, but seemed corroded somehow, evil in an inexpressible way. Her eyes were vampire yellow, but the rest of her face was untransformed; and the serpentine dragon tattoo that had been on her back was now coiling around her neck like a living thing, its tail snaking beneath the curve of her nearly exposed left breast. "Don't forget the other dragons," she said, as blood began to creep down from her hairline like crimson sweat.  
  
He jerked awake on impact, and even before he was fully conscious, tore off whatever had attacked him and threw it aside, claws springing free of their own accord.  
  
"Ooh, the sleeper awakens. Don't kill me, it was just a shirt," Marc said, continuing to walk down the narrow aisle, putting on his leather jacket.  
  
As soon as he remembered where he was - and why it felt like the "room" was tilting down - he looked to see that the reason he'd woken up was due to the shirt Marc had thrown on him. It was now draped on the far seat across the aisle from him, looking like a shed skin." You did that on purpose," he snapped, feeling embarrassed but not about to admit it. He quickly retracted his claws. "You know it's not safe to wake me up like that." He couldn't believe he'd nodded off either. He supposed he should be grateful he didn't dream about Mariko …. but what the hell had that thing with Yasha been about? Why did his life have to be filled with the senseless?  
  
"Hey, I was standing far away from you when I did that," he claimed, giving him that grin again. He probably thought it was roguish, but it was pure smart ass. "Thought you might wanna wake up for landing."  
  
"We reached Hong Kong already?"  
  
Marc snorted in disbelief. "Already? I dozed through the final two parts of the Matrix trilogy, and had time to narrow down the choices of demon that Keanu Reeves must have made a deal with - or slept with - to lead such a charmed life. And I nuked myself a bowl of curry, although it could have been cardboard, and contemplated the sad state of world affairs, as I tried to figure out if there was a causal relationship between that and the poor quality of American sitcoms. Yet I still had time to contemplate my navel, and wonder if masturbating in the airplane crapper counts as joining the "mile high club". Oh, and we touched down in Vancouver for refueling and supplies."  
  
Logan stared at him in disbelief. "It's been that long?"  
  
"Yes indeedy. You sleep hard."  
  
"I must." He got up, feeling the deceleration of the plane, the shift of gravity and velocity, and as he stood and grabbed the shirt, he said, "We should be buckled up or somethin', shouldn't we?"  
  
Marc just shrugged, although he did sit down near the front. "Prob'ly. But, fuck it - it's a rich guy's private jet. It probably has air bags or something."  
  
Logan grabbed the shirt and didn't sit down more than he was lightly thrown back into his seat. He was surprised at how heavy the shirt was; it was about the weight of a doorstop, and a rather heavy one at that. "What the fuck is this, chain mail?"  
  
"Just about. It's part of the body armor I told you about. Some stuff I took from that lab experimenting on mutants in Europe. I have no fucking idea what it is, some kinda metallo-ceramic polymer - but it makes Kevlar look like Styrofoam. Good stuff."  
  
Logan held up the shirt. It looked like a plain black t-shirt, but had an odd sheen to it when the light hit it at a certain angle, like it was sharkskin, perhaps, or some kind of synthetic silk. "They made 'em shirts?"  
  
"They made 'em in a lot of things. Vests, shirts, coats, a neck guard type of thing-y, even helmets draped with the stuff, but I didn't take any of those 'cause they looked dorky. I was hopin' for codpieces, but never found any. I figured the shirts would make the most sense right now, as they cover the most area, and are inconspicuous. They just look like any old shirts. Maybe just a touch gay."  
  
He sighed, and let the shirt fall into his lap. "Look, I know you mean well -"  
  
"Put it on," Marc interrupted, his voice low and serious. "Do it now, or I'll do something you'll regret."  
  
He matched him, glare for glare. "No."  
  
Marc sat forward, never breaking eye contact with him (well, as far as he could tell with those goggles on), and rested his hands on his knees. "Okay, so I met Steve as this nightclub with the admittedly awful name Pink Flamingo - I mean, why not just call it Fudge Packers, y'know? But, I respect that's it's named after the John Waters film - hell, it's Baltimore, and he's all we got for a celebrity; he's cool - and Steve wasn't usually the type I like -"  
  
"Shut up."  
  
"- but every now and then I'm a sucker for a guy who can really fill out his jeans; he also had a great ass. I mean, premium junk in that trunk. So, we-"  
  
Logan quickly pulled the shirt on over his head, not bothering to take off the t-shirt he already had on. It was more of an undershirt anyways. "There! Will you shut up now?!"  
  
Marc's face split into a slow, triumphant grin, and he chuckled, gloating ever so slightly at his award winning blackmail. "But I was just getting to the best part, where he actually tells me the sores on his dick are the result of a rash."  
  
"You're making that up." Or at least he hoped he was.   
  
"You'll never know for sure, will ya?" He sat back, chuckling contentedly to himself. "You may be Mr. Persistent, but no one can out annoy me, bud."  
  
There was little "Give Bob a chance."  
  
He made a dismissive hand gesture. "He don't count - he's a god. How the fuck do you out annoy a god? Ask me to build a raft out of ketchup packets, why don't you."  
  
Logan lifted the blind still covering his window, and looked outside.   
  
It was not only night in Hong Kong, but overcast, so most of their approach was shrouded in misty fog. But every now and then a wisp of cloud would break away like a fragile ghost, and lights of the city would emerge from the darkness like jewels spotted in a turbulent, muddy tide pool. It was a gorgeous sight, all those neon lights like gems sparkling on their display towers, surrounded by water as black as ink yet full of boats of all kinds and descriptions. Hong Kong was really a cluster of interconnected islands - many people still lived on boats in the harbor, in fact - and the incongruity of old fashioned remnants of that society contrasted with the desperately "high tech" of the crowded mainland city was more startling than it was in Tokyo, simply because in Japan they were a bit more segregated - here, because land space was at such a premium, they were crammed in side by side. Taking a good look at the city let you know exactly where the production designer got the idea of a future Los Angeles for Blade Runner.   
  
"Pretty, isn't it?" Marc said, glancing out the window closest to him.  
  
He grunted non-committally. It was, and yet ... did it make him feel slightly nervous?   
  
"Ever been here before?"  
  
For some reason, Logan found the very question startling, but he was careful not to let it show. "I dunno. You?"  
  
Marc shrugged. "Nah, this is one of the few places I haven't been. Seen it in movies, though. Think that counts?"  
  
"Probably not." Marc started his weapons inventory, making sure the guns were fully loaded and checking the safeties, and Logan asked, "We gotta plan here?"  
  
He looked up, seemingly surprised. "You're gonna let me be in charge? Wow." He grinned at Logan's scowl. "No real plan yet, as we don't know what kinda reception Tony's gonna get. But I think it's best that wherever he goes, we go with him. If he remains in a secured area, we can take shifts - you know, someone catches some z's while the other guy pulls babysitting detail."  
  
"I can go for four days without sleep." Admittedly, he was punchy and hallucinating by the fourth day, but did that matter much?  
  
Marc raised an eyebrow before shaking his head. "Naw, ain't happenin'. I know you don't like to sleep, but I'm gonna need you sharp, bro. My infrared is gonna be completely fucked in a city heavily converted to wi-fi frequencies, not to mention so much concrete generally radiates heat."  
  
"Heat island."  
  
"Right. So we're gonna be needing your schnozz more than ever. You got better than average eyesight, right?"  
  
"Schnozz?" He grimaced at the word, finding it hard not to laugh. That's what you had to love about Marcus - he refused to take a life or death situation completely seriously. "And yeah, better than average sight, I guess."  
  
"You guess? You don't know?"  
  
He shrugged. "Never really got it tested. But if I concentrate, I can single out individual grains of dirt. Also, I can see things in great details for two miles from a relatively high vantage point."  
  
"Okay, yeah, I'm gonna guess that's better than average." He finished checking out a silver plated Glock, then held it out towards him, butt first.  
  
Logan shook his head. "Don't want it."  
  
"Hey, bud, do I need to tell you that this is how it's gonna be? All that cool 'Kill Bill' shit aside, neither the Yakuza or the Triad truck much with swords or hand to hand; they use automatic weapons and bombs and shit - stuff that allows them to keep a safe distance from their target."  
  
"I know. You shoot back - I'll go for 'em while you keep 'em busy."  
  
"Y'know, that might work once. As soon as they realize what you're packing, they'll probably work hard to keep a greater distance."  
  
He shrugged a single shoulder, as the plane leveled out; they were definitely on final approach now. "Which works for us, 'cause the farther away they are, the more room that gives us, and the more mistakes they make. Let's face it - against us, they don't got a chance. They're just normal Humans, after all." He added a slight smirk, so Marc knew he was kidding about that last part.  
  
Although he smiled back, he didn't seem to be convinced. "As far as we know. Who knows, maybe one of 'em has joined the modern era and employed a mutant or two. We can't get cocky."  
  
"Says the cocky guy."  
  
"Hey, if you got laid as much as I do, you'd be cocky too. But that ain't the point." After a moment, he added, "D'ya think the Yakuza guys might recognize you?"  
  
"Huh?"  
  
"Well, it ain't like you age. And the Yakuza isn't known for being forgiving."  
  
He just shrugged, glancing out the window again. Now all he could see were the blue landing lights of a small airport. "If they wanna bring it, they're welcome to do so. I think I have some issues I need to work out."  
  
Marc chuckled, holstering the gun. "I hear that. It might be fun."  
  
That was another reason why they got along so well.  
  
****  
  
At least Tagawa knew enough to try and cover his tracks.  
  
A third party he knew from his business dealings sent out an armored sedan to meet them at the airport. He and Marc carefully checked out the driver - a young Chinese guy who seemed especially startled by Marc (was it the strange goggles, the muscles that seemed ready to burst out of his bulletproof shirt, or his skin color? Maybe all three - it was kind of impossible to say.) - and the car itself before giving an all clear. The three of them piled in the back, Tagawa sandwiched between them, although there was some comfort in the dark tinted glass. Logan was glad to get inside, away from the city smell; he could smell Hong Kong already - the cars, the industries, the fish and saline, the pollution waiting to happen and the most prevalent scent of all, the Humans, thousands upon millions of them in the humid night. It basically smelled like New York City, but with less pollution and more sea salt. He needed a moment to adjust, but once they were under way, he was sure he was inured to it by now.  
  
"So where are we headed, exactly?" Logan asked, since he didn't know.  
  
Tagawa, who remained unfazed and calm through all of this, said, "My brother kept a secret apartment - a "safe house" if you will - and I thought perhaps that would be the best place to stay. Even my family didn't know about it, so I presume it's safe."  
  
"How did you find out about it?"  
  
"I found it," Marc offered. "I just followed a bouncing money trail, and an alias that seemed a bit dodgy."  
  
"Jochiro Kawasaki," Tagawa interjected. "That was the name of my brother's imaginary friend when he was six."  
  
"Cute." Although he was relieved it wasn't common knowledge, it still made his stomach do a minor flip flop. If Marc could follow the money trail, so could someone else. "What if some of his business associates know about it?"  
  
Tagawa grimaced. "Let's hope they don't."  
  
"If they do, they're gonna get a nasty surprise," Marc noted. He crossed his arms over his chest, and seemed very casual, slumped back against the leather seat, but of course it was just his pose. His hands were within easy reach of the guns he wore under each arm, and of course he had another gun in a belt holster, and at least one strapped to his leg (and he had a knife in his boot - he prepared for everything). Although Tagawa seemed to be wearing the same tan and white shirt as before, Logan could smell that he was wearing one of the bulletproof shirts too, underneath his white button down dress shirt.   
  
It wasn't long before they got caught in the gnarly mess of downtown Hong Kong traffic - its roads were as clogged as New York City's, and for the very same reason - not a hell of a lot of room. The buildings, all skyscrapers more massive and modern than the next, seemed crammed in like stakes in the bottom of a hunter's pit, and he felt instantly hemmed in. This wasn't good - the traffic was standing still when it wasn't creeping, and anyone could hit this car from the street. And the sidewalks were crowded; it was like Time's Square on a Wednesday night. "Maybe I should get out," Logan offered. "I can watch the crowd-"  
  
Tagawa's cell phone trilled - he had the ring programmed to sound like a speeded up version of the X-Files theme (cute) - but he simply held his jacket open, and Marc plucked it out of the inside pocket deftly, as if they'd done this before. They probably had - he had no idea how long Marc had been employed by Tagawa. And Marc said, with a phony Southern accent, "What y'all want?"  
  
Logan shook his head, and continued scanning the crowd through the dark windows. This city looked kind of familiar, didn't it?  
  
He vaguely heard a tinny female voice on the phone say, in English, "If that's you, Drury, we're ready at the drop point, but hurry your fool ass up."  
  
"Patience, missy," he replied, then broke the connection and slipped it back in Tagawa's pocket. "Okay, we're good to go." Marc reached into his own leather jacket, and pulled out what looked like a walkie talkie. "Hover, this is Scorpion. What's your ten?"  
  
The communicator crackled, before a male voice responded with what Logan assumed was a code phrase. "My ten is actually thirteen and three- eights."  
  
"You do the oddest things to my security," Tagawa commented dryly, smirking at Marc.  
  
Marcus just gave him that famous grin of his, and said into the comm, "We're almost up on target area. How is it?"  
  
"All clear. Falcon wants to get this done ASAP; the Chinese authorities are cracking down hard on unauthorized flights."  
  
"Got it. Be there momentarily." He pocketed the walkie talkie as the car seemed to move up about six feet before coming to idle in the heavy traffic.   
  
"Am I gonna be let in on what's goin' on?" Logan wondered, a little annoyed that Marc hadn't fully briefed him about this.   
  
"It's just the old bait an' switch," Marc told him, craning his head as if trying to see what street they were on. "Well, we're close enough. Feel lucky?"  
  
He had said that to Tagawa, who nodded. "I trust all of you with my life. Obviously."  
  
Marc pointed towards Logan's side window. "See that alley opening, between the skyscraper and the tea shop?"  
  
"Yeah."  
  
"We're gonna get out and hustle Tony through it. Hover is covering the area, so we should have a clear shot straight through to the private parking strip."  
  
"And waiting there is..?"  
  
"Our real transportation to the site. Only a fucking loon would travel by car now."   
  
Logan guessed what it was, and decided not to point they could be shot down by surface to air missiles. Marc wasn't an idiot. "And we can trust these people, Hover and Falcon and whoever the fuck else is in on this?"  
  
Tagawa smiled serenely. "If they wish to earn their money, they keep me safe."  
  
And money was a damn good motivator. But what if the Triad or the Yakuza blackmailed them, or offered them more money? It was all a gamble. But Tagawa had survived among these underworld types long enough, and besides, Tagawa had made sure everyone thought he was coming in tomorrow, not tonight - another version of the bait and switch. Logan imagined Tagawa was the king of the gamblers, and won so many times it had long since ceased being funny. "You know this is risky." That was for Marc, not Tony.  
  
Marcus nodded, taking a cursory glance out his window. "Yeah, but it's a good bet they don't know we're in the city yet, and I don't think they've all memorized Tone's face yet."  
  
"All we old men look alike," Tagawa joke, but Logan was unnerved to notice he was glancing at him with a sly smile. Was he implying something?  
  
Marcus was now looking at him, one eyebrow raising in curiosity as he realized he had missed something, but too focused on the job to ask what right now. "We ready, bud?"  
  
Logan took a deep breath, mentally preparing himself to take the city stink he was sure to be swamped with as soon as he opened the door. "Yeah."  
  
"Flanking protocol," he added, rapping a brief tattoo on the bulletproof glass partition separating them from the driver. The car remained idling as Marc popped open the door on his side and got out, right in the street, causing several annoyed and startled honks. Logan opened his door and slid out, letting the thousands of scents wash over him without overwhelming him, and wasn't too surprised that Tagawa got out right behind him. Several pedestrians gave them looks, ranging from puzzled to blandly curious to ticked off by the rude foreigners, but Logan got no sense of a threat; nothing struck him instantly as off. The night was intensely humid - another New York similarity - but actually somewhat cool, an odd and uncomfortable combination.  
  
Marc joined him, and walking with Tagawa between them they moved briskly to the alley, which was narrow but strangely clean, possibly because it had been freshly hosed down by a shopkeeper. The lot ahead of them was dark, lit only by ambient light shed from the surrounding skyscrapers and their mirrored windows, and Logan figured it was to hide the helicopter as long as possible. He smelled the woman before he saw her. "Finally," she said, scowling at them. She was a Japanese woman of average height, dressed in some kind of gray flight suit, with a dark blue shirt beneath. Her shoulder length black hair was held back in a severe ponytail, and slapped against her shoulder as she turned to give Marcus an evil look. "Come on, let's go, I can't have this bird here for long." She took a transparency out of her pocket, unrolled it, and slapped it on the side of the helicopter. It was a caduceus, a winged staff with two twining snakes around it - an international symbol for medicine. They were going disguised as a medi-vac? Cute, but how long could they last if they were challenged?  
  
"We're here, Yukio - isn't that what matters?" Marc replied jovially.  
  
She gave him an evil look before disappearing around the chopper, and getting in on the pilot's side. The rotors started to spin as they neared, and by the time Marc opened the back door and he and Tagawa slid inside, the rotors were at half lift off speed. The doors and windows looked armored, which would be good if they were shot at, but not if someone had a missile or a rocket propelled grenade launcher laying around the clubhouse. Still, wasn't worth worrying about until it looked like it might happen.  
  
Once they had taken off, Marcus told him, "We're going to the Chen-Lai building, which has been shut down for a week due to - supposedly - "health violations". We land on their helipad, take the exec elevator down, and get in another armored car to take us to our final destination."  
  
"This is rather elaborate, isn't it?"  
  
Marc shrugged. Once again, Tagawa was sitting between them, as if it would help. "I dare someone to tail us."  
  
Okay, he had a point there.  
  
Once they were airborne and leveled out, Tagawa decided an introduction was in order. He leaned forward, and shouted, "Yukio, this is Logan, Marcus's business associate. Logan, this is Yukio Sakibara, my transportation chief from the Tokyo office."  
  
She turned her head towards him, the slightest acknowledgment possible . She wore the headphone radio/mike all helicopter pilots wore, as well as night vision goggles that hummed low, and gave off a slightly greenish light at the edges. That made sense - she could avoid any incoming object simply by seeing it and engaging in evasive maneuvers. But the cold front coming off her suggested she didn't like Marcus, and since she assumed him to be his friend, she didn't like him any better.  
  
A cell phone trilled in the tiny cabin, and while he glanced at Tagawa, both he and Marcus glanced at him. Since it wasn't playing The X-Files theme, he belatedly realized it was his own. "Oh, shit," he exclaimed, finding the phone in his pocket. He'd forgotten he even had the phone. He pulled it out, and snapped, "What?"  
  
There was a long, startled pause before a voice asked, "Have I called at a bad time?"  
  
Angel. Somehow that was the last voice he expected to hear on the line. It was weird when his separate worlds collided like this. "I dunno - what's this about?"  
  
"I can call back -"  
  
"Please spit it out."  
  
He sighed, and for the first time he realized Angel sounded … well, down. Maybe kind of depressed. "I got some results on those pills you gave me, Yasha's. I thought you might want to hear them."  
  
"Yeah, of course."  
  
"Sorry it took a while, things have been … " He paused momentarily. "You don't know where Bob is, do you?"  
  
"No." That wasn't good. "Why d'ya ask? Need him?"  
  
He let out a slight, humorless scoff. "No, not anymore. It's just … things have been majorly fucked up lately. More than usual."  
  
"I know the feeling."  
  
"Are you on a helicopter? I hear rotors."  
  
Since the cell phone connection wasn't the best, Logan attributed that to vampire hearing. "Yeah. Marcus's taking me on an aerial tour of Hong Kong." Marcus peered past Tagawa, and gave him a curious look, mouthing, 'Who is it?' He mouthed back 'Angel', and left it at that, looking out the window to avoid Tagawa's confused look. The city skidded away below them, looking like a field of jeweled daggers.  
  
"Really? Should I go? Are you currently being shot at?"  
  
If Marc knew he was constantly equated with violence, he'd probably find it hilarious. "Nah, it's cool. For now. So what do you got for me?"  
  
"Well, the lab's … kind of in disarray right now, so I can only give you partial results. But it seems the bottles you brought in are full of mystical poisons."  
  
"What does that mean exactly?"  
  
"Well, it means they kill mystical things, or cast mystical ailments on any unfortunates who take them. We did identify one specifically, nuskulium, a toxin fatal to Sclerran demons."  
  
"Never heard of 'em."  
  
"I'd kind of hope not." He heard Angel opening a refrigerator, and realized he was calling him from wherever he lived. What time was it in Los Angeles? "They're infiltrators; extremely nasty."  
  
"Infiltrators?"  
  
"They basically enter a human body and alter its genetic code. The person starts physically changing into a Sclerran host - Sclerran hosts don't exists in this dimension, but the Sclerrans do; it seems they can survive in sewers if they can't find a host - and the person basically because the slave of the Sclerran parasite. By the time a person has been altered, there's no way to kill the inner Sclerran without killing them too."  
  
"But this nuskulium, whatever, would take 'em out?"  
  
"If an infected person took them, yes."  
  
"You guys are immune to 'em, right?"  
  
Angel paused. "You guys? What do you mean "you guys"? I tho- oh, wait. There's someone else there, right? A civilian?"  
  
"You got it."  
  
"Ah, okay." He paused, and he heard something thunk on a countertop. Bottle of beer? Blood? "Yes, vampires are immune. One demon cannot infect another; it's usually like putting two male Siamese fighting fish in the same bowl."  
  
"Fight to the death."  
  
"Yeah. And while Sclerran's are bad … nothing fights like a pissed off vampire. Trust me, I know. What's theirs is theirs, and they don't give it up to some pissant interloper." He took a drink of something, then sighed again. "Yasha was a vampire. She smelled like one, and she didn't have scales. Sclerrans are covered with scales, but armored ones, kind of like armadillos."  
  
"Ick. So why do you think she had them?"  
  
"I couldn't begin to guess. They're not exactly a common form of demon either."  
  
"Could it effect something else?"  
  
"Still looking into that, but it's unlikely. The only other thing we have an i.d. on is boitatan, a version of a witch's brew in capsule form; it basically enslaves a person or demon to the being who gave it to them until the spell wears off. It's hard to say how long that might be, but I think the average is about seventy two hours."  
  
"And then what?"  
  
"Uh, with this stuff? The victim burns up, from the inside out. See, the spell itself needs lots of energy, and in a bit of ironic nastiness, it extracts it all from the victim -"  
  
"So why have this?" He interrupted impatiently. He could no longer see the cityscape running below them like a river - his mind was too busy making connections that were tenuous at best. But very worrisome.  
  
"Well, I've been thinking about that." Angel then paused dramatically, and Logan wondered if he was being an asshole, or just trying to figure out the best way to say something terrible. "Don't take this the wrong way, Logan, but … uh … are you sure she was out of the killing game? I mean, if her curse only covered taking pleasure in killing … that doesn't mean she would necessarily give it up, does it? It just means it would give her no joy. I know what she told you -"  
  
Angel went on, but Logan no longer heard him. He remembered exactly how he met Yasha, and how violently opposed she was to Fujimori, to the point where she would save a mysterious gaijin like him, even though he too was after the life/death sword. She really wanted to wipe Fujimori off the map. Fujimori, the demon gangster, who was swallowing up all the Yakuza territory because they couldn't fight the threat he represented. Fujimori and Yasha both seemed to loathe each other, but he never heard the whole story behind that, did he? There must have been much more history there to feed such consumptive hatred - but he never knew it.   
  
And of course Yasha still killed - didn't she kill some of the faux Vantha cult when she joined Angel and the Sisters in looking for him after he'd been kidnapped? She was very good at killing, just like him; she was very good with her blades.  
  
He felt a cold, ominous twinge in his stomach as he suddenly wondered who Yasha may have been really working for. And why she really wanted him. 


	6. Part 6

9  
  
Nakamura laid the evidence out on the table like he was dealing an oversized deck of cards. And he certainly had "twenty one" with this hand.   
  
Glossy print outs of poor security camera footage, magnified to the point where it almost pixilated, in black and white that really looked more like silver-gray and black. People caught at odd angels, looking away, talking to one another … except for one. One shot, number eight in the sequence, showed one of the men looking straight at the concealed, distant camera, glaring at it in annoyance and defiance. He had no idea why, but that instantly struck him as a warning sign. That had to be mere coincidence, though - he couldn't have known the airport's automated security cameras had picked them up. They weren't visible from anywhere on the tarmac.  
  
"Just like we suspected, Tagawa came in tonight," Nakamura said, as if that wasn't all patently obvious. "By the time these photos were transmitted to us, they had left the a-"  
  
"Who's this?" He asked, pointing at the glaring man. Something about him looked hard, craggy, but it wasn't physical, save for the darkness behind his eyes; he simply looked like trouble. "The white?"  
  
Nakamura - technically his cousin - grimaced, and the light caught his eyes in a way that made the thin plastic lenses of his contacts visible; they looked like ghostly corneas floating atop the real ones. "We assume he's just hired muscle f-"  
  
"He is not," he corrected sharply. "The black is, clearly - I can see the bulges of the guns he wears beneath his coat, even from these poor photos. This one is more than muscle. He seems familiar to me, and not in a good way. Why is this?"  
  
Nakamura gaped at him like a fish. Idiot child. If he was not family, he'd have him shot and disposed of long ago. "Uh, I -"  
  
"Find out. Fax these photos back to Tokyo, have him compared to the lists of gaijins who owe us a debt of blood."  
  
Nakamura looked slightly goggle eyed, his thin lips twisting into something far less attractive than usual. "But … sir, the gaijins who owe us blood have all …. paid…"  
  
How he loved euphemisms. Why say "killed" when "paid" could carry the same connotations? It honestly made him chuckle, but everyone else took him dead seriously. He supposed he should pity the humorless clods, except he thought that was the most useless and wasted of emotions. If someone actually merited pity, they were better off dead. "People slip through the cracks, Masao; they are forgotten, or they disappear. Not everyone is taken when they should be."  
  
The pathetic boy was almost shaking in his shoes. Obviously he wasn't assured that he would not kill him someday. "I'll get right on that."  
  
"You do that. Let me know the moment the ground team has a fix on Tagawa's location. I know that old man thinks he's smarter than the rest of us, but there's no fool like an old fool."  
  
"Y-yes sir," Nakamura agreed, hastily gathering the photo prints off the long mahogany conference table. He simply sat back in his chair and watched as the nervous lackey seemed to increase his normal nervous tics tenfold under his gaze. It amused him deeply to watch it, but he waited until he was gone before he smiled.  
  
He turned his chair towards the window wall behind him, that overlooked the harbor, and revealed a good chunk of the Hong Kong skyline across the dark expanse of water. Boats currently glided along its still surface like water bugs, and for a while he watched them, finding it almost calming.  
  
Tagawa was a very crafty fellow. He knew who to hide behind. The black hired muscle looked like he would be difficult, and surely he would be - Tagawa would only cower behind the finest, the most violent, possibly the craziest. The white looked less impressive by comparison, as he had little over half the muscle mass of the other … so why did he think he was the real dangerous one? He got a sense he should know him, and be not just bothered that Tagawa had chosen him, but consider it an outright declaration of war. Why was that? Why did that gaijin make him so instantly angry?  
  
Sanjiro Yashida watched the boats in the harbor, and wondered what he had to be afraid of.  
  
10  
  
Retreating was honestly a poor option, especially when you were stuck inside your own mind, and really had no place to go. While she still had no sense of herself, she did have a sense of growing, encroaching darkness, like a physical thing, somewhere beyond her. It hadn't quite come for her yet, but she knew it would be, once it got tired of playing with her. This had set off Jean's natural fury. What right did this bastard have to play mind games with her? Who was the telepath around here?  
  
She found herself wandering the silver metal corridors of the headquarters beneath the school, and since this territory was hers, not its, she decided this was as good a place as any to try and make a stand. She headed for the medical lab, her home away from home.   
  
When she went inside, all was as she remembered it: surfaces spotlessly clean, lights harsh but revealing, glinting off some of the metal like sun off the water, but one of the tables was occupied by a supine figure , barefoot and shirtless, wearing only black cotton pants out of some semblance of modesty. She didn't need to see his face to know who it was - frankly, you didn't forget a chest like that. "Hello, Logan," she said wryly, wondering if the thing was enjoying this. Probably; it seemed like a sadist. "So we're back here, huh? The fateful day you came into all our lives." She went through the motions of preparing for an exam, going so far as to grab a folded white lab coat out of one of the cupboards. She wondered how much the thing knew about medical instruments. "Scott first reported the physical oddities about you, you know. He said you had some cuts and deep bruises on you chest - he speculated broken ribs - from the beating Sabertooth gave you. He didn't believe Rogue's report that he actually hit you with a tree, because if that were true, you'd be dead. But then, after I talked him through getting the med-kit to sterilize the wounds, he muttered an obscenity - you know how rare that is for Scott - and said they were gone. It was my turn not to believe him." She started putting together a tray of medical instruments, but it was heavy on scalpels and syringes. "It took him two minutes to get the kit and come back - three, tops. The bruises were gone; the cuts were gone. The blood was still there, but nothing else. I knew he was telling the truth simply because I could sense how deeply unnerved he was. A healing factor as rapid and complete as yours can be a frightening thing when you first see it." She started opening cupboards, looking for the saw used to remove plaster casts. "We didn't know it was a healing factor then. We didn't know what to think. The Professor hadn't mentioned what your mutation was to anyone; presumably he didn't know. So once you were brought in here I cleaned off the blood, thinking I'd find something … but nothing. Your skin was flawless. Also, I couldn't help but notice, unusually soft for a man's. I intended to ask you what moisturizer you used, but if your skin never ages, it's always rather nice, isn't it? I also noticed you felt hot, and instruments confirmed your body temperature was above normal, along with your heart rate. I thought perhaps you had a fever, and decided to give you something, see if I could temporarily bring your fever down until I determined why you were sick. I thought maybe you had some kind of infection, pre-dating the fight, or maybe the flu. The symptoms of your healing factor at work actually do correspond to a mild illness; fever is a body's defense, after all. It's part of your healing factor too, but only as a brief side-effect. Even you notice your healing comes with a sudden flush of heat. The body at work; sometimes it's a marvelous thing."  
  
She could not find the saw. Maybe it had been moved and locked up, where no one could "accidentally" find it. She couldn't remember anymore. But it didn't matter. She had two trays of scalpels and syringes, and she turned to see "Logan" was still laying on the table, presumably unconscious. Going to act this out to the bitter end? She remained where she was, back to the counter. "When I went for the blood sample was when all hell broke loose. You really scared the shit out of me. See, I had my mind "open" a bit; I was listening for you to start regaining consciousness. But I didn't hear a thought from you until you already had me by the throat. I've never known anyone who could fight by instinct, who could thrown themselves into full consciousness by reflex, but you are a very unique man. Your first thought really made no sense to me :"Not again." Of course, if we knew then what we knew now, we'd never have put you down here. We'd have kept you upstairs in one of the empty rooms. You wouldn't have been a pleasant person, but maybe you wouldn't have instantly thought the worst, waking up in a place that smelled medical. It was like waking up a victim of shell shock on a live firing range. We never did apologize for that, did we? We should have. So now that you know that much about it … whatever the fuck your name is … you should know that I'm not going anywhere near the table. I know how this ends - I'm not going to make it easy for you."  
  
Logan sat up, and turned his empty eye sockets towards her. "Oh but come on - we've gone this far. And I can tell you've enjoyed getting this off your chest."  
  
"Actually, that's not the part I enjoyed," she replied, and then, reaching out with familiar mental muscles, flung the entire contents of the trays at him.   
  
It worked, like she convinced herself it would, and the dozen scalpels and syringes slammed into him like arrows. He jerked back, like he might fall off the table, but managed to remain sitting upright. In fact, he looked down at the implements now riddling his chest and abdomen with something like curiosity, then looked up at her, with his unsettlingly empty smile. "Talking as distraction. It's kind of Freudian, though, inn't? It reveals your thoughts, your guilt … your blame."  
  
"I have no idea what you're talking about." Couldn't he even pretend to be hurt?   
  
"Sure you don't." The scalpels and syringes sticking out of him suddenly began pulling inside of him, being sucked through his skin like it was a porous and ravenously hungry substance. But the truth was it was the thing inside the shell, his void, that made up his tenuous being. There was no blood, and his (faux) skin sealed up as quickly and perfectly as Logan's skin. "You got bad luck with men, don't cha?"  
  
"Isn't that a corporeal thing? Isn't that beneath you?"  
  
"Oh sure, but it's fun to make you squirm. So you get yourself a piece of young tail, but he's so repressed and anal he might as well be a mannequin, and you get the hots for a guy who is obviously a lot more fun, but too damn wild and damaged for your tastes."  
  
"I don't think of him as damaged."  
  
"Sure you don't," he replied, cheerfully malevolent. He hopped off the table, and started walking towards her. He tried to copy Logan's strange stalking swagger, but couldn't; he looked like the grotesque parody he was. She tried to telekinetically toss him across the room, but she was unable to get a sense of him as a physical presence, and therefore couldn't wrap her power around him. He was a void without presence; a thing that was but wasn't, at the very same time. "Why are you holdin' back on me, sweet buns? You're the avatar of Camaxtli, a god of war and bloodshed. You got oodles of ball shriveling power, babe. Why ain't cha throwin' it at me? Why are you holding back?"  
  
There was something about him trying to provoke her to lash out while wearing Logan's skin that struck her as odd. First his burnt arm, and now this. Coincidence? "Why do you want me to attack Logan?"  
  
He stopped, arms held wide as if in welcome. "What d'ya mean Logan, sweetheart? You know it's me."  
  
"And I know you weren't trying to provoke a fight while looking like Scott, either." The answer seemed so obvious she couldn't believe it. "You want me to kill Logan."  
  
He scoffed. "I don't even know who the fuck he is."  
  
"Yes, you do, because he's Bob's avatar. And you already said you didn't like Bob. So this is a way of conditioning to be violent against Logan, isn't it?"  
  
He gave her that empty grin of his, that wedge of space where his nothingness couldn't have been more apparent. "So this is the analytical "Doctor Jean", is it? I hate to poke holes in your funny theory, but you have to be alive to kill anything. And the future doesn't look to rosy for ya right now."  
  
She shook her head, sure she was on to something here. Conspiracies weren't just for the corporeal. "It's revenge. Bob is blackmailing Osiris - and by extension, you - into doing this. And what better way to piss him off than take away his avatar?"  
  
"You have no idea what you're talking about." But his smile had taken on a edge that could only be called predatory.   
  
"I bet you don't. No one said you had to be smart to be a god killer."  
  
If something without eyes could be said to glower, it did. "You're trying to make me angry. You don't want to do that."  
  
But maybe, if you were doomed, choosing your method of departure was the only choice you had.  
  
11  
  
They checked out the place before they let Tagawa in, but it was clear.   
  
It didn't seem like a gangster's hidey hole, but yet in several respects it did. Hong Kong real estate was outrageously overpriced, precisely because there were so many people and so little usable space. So many of the skyscrapers that littered the city were actually apartment buildings, and Tagawa's brother lived on the thirty fifth floor of one, but not just any skyscraper, it seemed. According to Tony, this building was full of politicians and others who were either in the Hong Kong government or worked with the Chinese government - a unique division that spoke volumes. It also guaranteed that no one would hit this building, because the Chinese government was not one you wanted to piss off. Fuck its "favored nation" status - China was a dictatorship. They executed people, and then sent the family of the executed a bill for the bullets used to kill their loved one; they were stone cold hard. You really didn't want to fuck with them.   
  
But, having said that, it was also clear that there must have been collusion - on some level - between the Triad and the Chinese government. Because if the government really wanted to wipe them out, they would be gone, no muss, no fuss. So somebody was letting it survive, whether through bribes or tradition or a combination of the two. And just that fact alone made the Triads more potentially dangerous than the Yakuza, because they had political weapons in their arsenal.   
  
It was a pretty roomy apartment for Hong Kong - three room (including a relatively large bathroom), including a spacious living room with a polarized window looking between neighboring towers to a thin slice of the harbor beyond. The floor was polished hardwood covered with the occasional Turkish rugs, but it smelled dusty, like it hadn't been inhabited for months, which was a good thing even though it made him sneeze. It was very tastefully if austerely furnished, which is why it didn't strike him like a gangster hideout. But there were a few touches that gave clues about its previous inhabitant: a small baggie of cocaine in the well stocked bar, a dagger hidden beneath a couch cushion, a well oiled Magnum in a box beneath the bed, and a similarly maintained Glock in a case in the bathroom cupboard. There were probably a couple of more hidden weapons, but Logan didn't care to look for them.  
  
Tagawa was tired, possibly from the long flight, so he went to sack out in the bedroom. Once he was gone, Logan suggested to Marc, "Maybe you should get some sleep now, while you can."  
  
Marc was currently lounging casually on the smoky gray leather sofa, with a crystal glass of scotch in his hand. He might have had an extremely well stocked bar, but Tetsuo curiously had no beer - Logan imagined he was one of those pretentious, snobby amoral gangster types. "Naw man, it's cool. But if you wanna -"  
  
"I slept on the plane. I know you didn't."  
  
"Yeah I did. Told ya, I snoozed through the Matrix films."  
  
He scowled at him. "Will you get some sleep already?"  
  
Marc shrugged, and gulped down the rest of his scotch, hiding a yawn. He then thunked the heavy glass down on one of the glass and iron end tables, and stretched out fully on the couch. "Gonna give me a good night kiss?"  
  
Logan flashed him a middle finger before turning back to Tetsuo's laptop on the bar. Marc chuckled, like he knew he would.  
  
He felt odd sitting on a leather bar stool - a good, comfortable kind, a kind that didn't seem to exist in real bars anymore, just like a polished cherry wood bar top like this   
  
didn't really exist anymore - going through the meager files on someone else's computer, especially since Marc was the computer expert around here. But this was a Japanese laptop, which meant the keyboard wasn't in English letters, but kanji, the "symbol" language of Japanese text. Marc couldn't read it, but Logan could; he could also read any Japanese documents he found. But as it turned out, Tetsuo had "scrubbed" his hard drive - there was nothing on it of note. He opened a browser, and found that he bookmarked a few porn site, including some extremely unsavory ones that seemed to indicate they involved bestiality - what kind of sick fuck was Tetsuo? Logan was glad he was dead, or he'd have tossed him out his own fucking window.  
  
He realized he had nothing better to do, and after finding a software program that displayed English language pages (well, if it wouldn't display the characters, the pages wouldn't load properly, if at all), he decided to check his e-mail. He hadn't done that since … had he ever done that? He kind of forgot he even had an e-mail address.  
  
Well, the spammers hadn't. Amazing. Some of them seemed to be from the same places that Tetsuo had bookmarked. He did have one legitimate e-mail, from Srina. She was still in England, back from vacation, and while she enjoyed her time away, she was apparently having a minor crisis - she didn't want to leave her flat.  
  
That tiny thing over the bookshop, where the street noise leaked in a bit too much at times. She knew she could move to a better place, a roomier place, but she found to her own personal astonishment she didn't want to, and suspected there was something wrong with her. As if to emphasize that point, she added that she missed him. It was easy to read, in between the lines of her letter (e-mail), how lonely she actually was.  
  
And god, he could sympathize. He also knew why Srina had no desire to upgrade her digs - why? It was her safe nest, her womb, her bolt hole against the rest of the world, and it always served her well. There was some irony in the woman who could convince everyone she was invisible wanting to desperately hide out from the world, and yet he knew, in a way, she couldn't help it. One of the reasons they probably ever connected in the first place - beyond some mutual loneliness - was the fact that they both dwelled on the fringes of even mutant society, because they felt they had no choice. Srina was simply used to being alone, being on the outside, going in only to steal something, while he … well, when they first met, he was a mindfucked tool for the Organization, their friendly neighborhood mutant killer, so he had to be on the outside: he was a creature that didn't technically exist, working for an agency that didn't technically exist. How could he be "inside" anything? He liked to think that attracted them to each other, along with the possibility that maybe he was trying to reconnect with his lost humanity. Oh, and there was the sex too. But he knew from being with her that they just seemed to fill the empty spaces within each other; it was a temporary feeling, but always better than nothing, better than living with the fact that you weren't whole, and you didn't know how to fix yourself.  
  
She sounded so lost he wished he could reach through the monitor and touch her; he knew the feeling. He figured e-mailing her back was the best he could do. But what to say? He decided then that, after this was all over, he'd go to London and he would see her - and tell her everything. About Mariko, about Yasha (who may or may not have betrayed him), about everything that had happened these last few moths. Bob knew, perhaps, but he'd never told anyone about all of this; Marc came close, but he wasn't prepared to share so much of Mariko with him. It was probably sexist of him, but he felt more comfortable with the idea of telling a woman about her, and how he felt … his memories of her. He knew he could trust Srina too. Maybe there was "no honor among thieves", but she always kept his secrets. In fact he knew, if he was objective, he and Srina were probably a match made in heaven (theoretically) - both were oddballs even among fellow mutants, they could only stand others for so long before they needed their privacy, and they both didn't trust as a matter of course, but they trusted each other. Just one of those weird coincidences that made life so interesting sometimes.  
  
He sat there for the longest time, not sure what to type, but eventually he thought of something - the bare facts. He was in Hong Kong with a friend, but as soon as he was done here, he'd probably swing by London, if she was willing to put up with him for a little bit. He told her to e-mail him back if she felt otherwise, as he'd actually bother to check it this time.  
  
He had agonized over the content of the e-mail for so long, Marc was already asleep; he could here his slow, rhythmic breathing from here. Bob knew he was psychic, but he still got a sense that this was the rare calm before the storm. He knew he should enjoy it while he could.   
  
He wondered why that was so hard.  
  
12  
  
The drive to his lawyer in the morning was uneventful, but Tony had expected that. They had to know he was here, but they were probably still looking for him. There was a good chance they'd strike on the way back, but he assumed Marcus and Logan knew that. They still kept an eye out for things as Yukio, dressed like a professional hired car driver, steered the sedan deftly through the crowded streets of Hong Kong.   
  
He wondered if this would be a good place to die. If he had to, this would be a nice enough spot to do it in; Hong Kong was attractive in a chaotic, urban jungle sort of way. He just hoped he hadn't imperiled everyone else here.  
  
By the time he got to his solicitor's office, he asked Logan to stay with the car. He looked perturbed, like he thought he would, but he whispered to him - low, so she didn't hear it - that he didn't want to leave Yukio alone out here, especially if the potential of a car bomber still existed. Logan would know what to look for, and could deal with any threat; as well trained as Yukio was, he didn't know if she could. Logan reluctantly agreed to stay. He hoped he'd forgive him for the lie, if he ever found out about it. But he knew he could count on Logan's periodic, antiquated chivalry to make the whole thing easier to swallow.  
  
Marcus escorted him into the sterile lawyer's office, where everything was in muted tones of beige and gold, potted rubber plants dotting the corners that weren't taken up by filing cabinets or the occasional water cooler. The primly dressed, busy staff looked up in surprise, and tried to smooth their expressions into neutrality. Hong Kong was a melting pot, all right, although mainly whites left when Britain ceded the territory back to China - so now it was mainly a melting pot of former expatriates and Asians from all over, but there were very few blacks. And because there were some undertones of racism still existing - racism was everywhere, it just differed depending on the race doing the stereotyping and who was the target - most Asians around Hong Kong were genuinely startled by Marcus. But Marcus knew and didn't seem to care, and Tony saw it as a bonus, as people would think twice about getting in a fight with him.  
  
The black strong guy - the "muscle" - was a stereotype, and not a positive one, but Marcus hadn't only embraced it, he reveled in it. He had a very perverse sense of humor. The truth was, if he was as much of a stereotype as he often liked to appear, he'd be impossible to work with. As it was, he was usually the smartest man in the room - he also usually knew this. He was a dangerous combination of ability, perversity, non-conformity, and a restless intellect. It would be a small miracle if he lived past forty.  
  
The secretary turned her stunned gaze from Marcus to him, and blinked rapidly, as if trying to clear her vision. "Oh, um, Mr. Tagawa, I'll let Mr. Lee know you're here."  
  
"Thank you," he said politely, as Marc threw himself in an empty waiting room chair. He was checking it all out with his usual subtlety , but Tagawa remained standing. Lee was not his usual lawyer, but Takashi Suzuki was affiliated with this solicitor's office.   
  
Because wealthy people were generally treated better than normal people (it was an awful thing, but true anyways), the secretary answered her internal line, and then told him, "You can go in now, Mr. Tagawa."  
  
He nodded, and then told Marcus, "If you don't mind, I'll go in alone."  
  
Marcus raised his eyebrows at that. "You sure?"  
  
"Yes. If there was trouble here, it would come in the front door."  
  
Marcus accepted that with a grunt, not exactly thrilled, but accepting. "Shout if you need me. Good luck with the suits."  
  
"It's always a party," he agreed dryly, heading to the large oaken door. It was more than pleasant in the front office, but as soon as he entered Lee's office, he was greeted by a blast of filtered, cold air. What was with hermetically sealed buildings and heavy air conditioning?   
  
Mr. Lee's office was almost as big as the front room, with an ornately carved wooden desk taking up most of the central space, with a comfortable yet hardly warm loveseat pushed against the far wall, next to a realistic yet clearly fake ficus tree, and a small table containing a water pitcher and several glasses. He had a large executive chair, currently turned away from him, presumably looking out his window, but the blinds were half shut against the rather harsh light of day.   
  
Tony took a seat in one of the meagerly padded chairs before the ostentatious desk, and asked, "You haven't killed him, have you?"  
  
The chair slowly turned, and he found the somewhat bloated face of Shiro Morimoto giving him a phony, empty smile that looked sickly. "Of course not. We told him to take a walk, and he did. If he's smart, he'll walk until he hits the Pacific."  
  
Morimoto was an actual lawyer, and one firmly in the pocket of the Yakuza; he was their "go to" attorney, on the occasions where they needed one. He was also an unofficial spokesman for the group. He was pudgy in a way that suggested he was way too indulgent and comfortable with his life, which had ceased to be hard long ago - if indeed it ever was. He wore a sharply tailor black Prada suit with a white shirt and a blue tie, and all of it, combined with his thick, back swept mane of prematurely silver hair, he looked like an expensive undertaker gone to seed. That description probably wasn't far off from the truth. Tony simply folded his hands in his lap, and waited for Morimoto to get to threats.  
  
Finally, he obliged. "Are you slipping, old man, or do you just have balls bigger than glaciers? Did you think we didn't know you'd be coming sooner than not?" He chuckled darkly, without humor. "And then to spit in our face by bringing him. You live dangerously, old man. Are you really that eager to die?"  
  
"Him? Him who? Do you mean Marcus? We're all allowed a bodyguard." He knew exactly who he meant, but he preferred to play dumb. The most amazing thing was how many people actually bought it.  
  
Shiro shook his head, dark eyes glittering like topaz. "Not "Shaft" out there, if that's what his name is. You know damn well who I mean. That's why you went and got him, right? Don't think we haven't figured your intelligence network rivals ours."  
  
"Actually, it surpasses it. Can't you tell?"  
  
Shiro's eyes narrowed, his expression becoming set like stone, hard and deadly. When he reached into a desk drawer, he half expected him to pull out a gun and shoot him, but that seemed far too vulgar for Shiro, who was honestly quite prissy. Others did the dirty work; he simply sued family estates afterward. "The fucking gaijin ronin, Tagawa. The scourge, the Butcher of Tokyo." Shiro pulled a large photograph out of the drawer, and threw it on the edge of the desk, so he could get a good look at it. It was an old photo, obviously from a lower resolution security camera, and taken in a parking garage. There were a couple of men visible, but caught in profile was a man who was clearly Logan: his hair, both scalp and facial, were slightly different, but there was no way it could be anyone but him. "You brought him here, old man, and you made this battle personal."  
  
"My brother didn't make it personal?"  
  
Shiro ignored him. "Our people are in position, Tagawa - we've been waiting for you, and you're surrounded. Give us Logan Yashida, right this minute, or everyone in this building dies." 


	7. Part 7

He didn't let the announcement faze him, although part of it was surprising. "Why did you call him Yashida?"  
  
Shiro's eyes narrowed further, which seemed like a physical impossibility. "Didn't you do your research, old man? When he married into the family, he adopted the name. Not legally, of course - what court would allow a man to take his wife's name, especially when he has no papers to prove his own identity - but it was common knowledge. At least within the family."  
  
With the Yakuza, you had to become adept at reading between the lines. "You're saying some of the Yashida clan is still around?"  
  
"Not everybody lived in or around Tokyo. Some lived farther away; some were overseas at the time. But he did gut them as a legitimate crime family - he made the name a joke. Most of them changed their name rather than be associated with that farce. A couple had the money and connections to gut it through."  
  
"Some you know." Hardly a guess.  
  
"One of them has spent a lot of time and money getting past that ... incident. You have no idea what a slap in the face it is to bring him back."  
  
"Slap in the face? He's a free man - he can go where he wants. He's even been to Tokyo recently ... but, oh, I guess your wonderful intelligence network missed that."  
  
His expression soured so much it looked like he'd just bitten down on a lemon wedge. "Where is he, Tagawa?"  
  
He grimaced, shaking his head. "That man - "  
  
"Freak."  
  
" - that man destroyed two well armed families in hours; he cut through them like a warm knife through butter. Do you not think the same thing could happen again?"  
  
"We're ready for him this time."  
  
"Are you? He destroyed you once."  
  
Tony knew that would get to him, and it did. Shiro's glower was an ugly thing to behold. "No one destroys the Yakuza. Certainly not some ageless freak who owes us a blood debt."  
  
"Owes you? I'd think you owe him. You took his wife, did you not?"  
  
Shiro didn't answer that. "You're running out of time, old man. Where is he?"  
  
Tony sighed, and slumped back in his seat, which seemed to get less comfortable the longer time went by. "Do you want my brother's assets and all he left behind? I'm willing to negotiate, but only if you back off. There's been enough violence, don't you think?"  
  
He scoffed derisively. "Back off? You're surrounded, you senile fuck. We call the shots here."  
  
"Do you? Kill me and my people right now, and you will never know what became of anodyne."  
  
He tried to keep his neutral lawyer face, but his posture stiffened, as if he'd just tasered him in the ass. "I have no idea what you're talking about."  
  
"Oh really? My brother was very careless with his records, but what do you expect from a coke fiend? I have everything he had about anodyne, all of it, and it's in a place of safety far from here. If I do not call in a code at certain explicit intervals, one of my personal bodyguards - ironically not here with me - has been instructed to turn over all the records and samples to both the U.S. and Japanese governments. And you know how they are about illegal narcotics."  
  
He matched his stare for a long time, but Tony didn't blink. He was in the power position here, and Shiro was slowly starting to realize that. "You're bluffing."  
  
"Am I really?" He stood up, and Shiro jumped to his feet, as if about to try and restrain him, but he didn't move around the desk. "Why don't you find out, Shiro? Tell your boys to start pulling the trigger."  
  
"This is bullshit," he snarled. "You'd be incriminating your own brother!"  
  
"Who I never gave a fuck about even when he was alive," he replied coolly. "But now that he's dead, who really gives a shit? In fact, I think it would give me the smallest bit of pleasure to see his name smeared over the daily papers like so much excrement on a wall. My business is clean, which any investigation would reveal. How's about yours?"  
  
If looks could kill, Tony knew he'd have been scraped off the carpet with a shovel. "You have signed your death warrant, old man."  
  
"I have a habit of doing that," he admitted, moving towards the door. Turning his back on Shiro right now was extremely dangerous, and so very insulting; he was dismissing him as a threat, and they both knew it. "You play nice, and I'll make sure the records find their way back to your bloodthirsty organization. Do you really think I give a shit if people wish to kill themselves? But the moment you attack is the moment the records are mine for good." He put his hand on the door knob, and only then did he glance back at Shiro. He was so livid his face was nearly purple - his head looked like an overripe plum. "And I'd seriously reconsider going after Logan. I brought him here for one reason: to finish the job he started, and destroy you all. If I were you, I wouldn't remind him how much he hates you."  
  
"You're not leaving Hong Kong alive," he sputtered, so enraged he could barely talk.  
  
Tony gave him a small, professional smile. "We'll see." And he left Shiro impotently staring holes in his back.   
  
He loved how these people kept completely underestimating him. Would he have bothered to show up if he couldn't beat them all?  
  
As soon as he came out, Marcus stood up, looking a little puzzled. "That was fast."  
  
"He was called away on an emergency."  
  
"Lawyers have emergencies?"  
  
Tony grabbed his arm as he walked past, and gently tugged Marcus towards the door with him. If he held fast he couldn't have moved him, but Marcus played along. "We may need to hurry," he confided in a low voice.  
  
Marcus looked around suspiciously, keeping pace with him. "Why?"  
  
"Because I think the shooting's about to start."  
  
****  
  
Logan knew they were being watched. Someone - someones? - were staring so intensely at the car it made him feel like he wanted to crawl out of his own skin. The car windows were tinted, though, no one could see inside, but he still didn't like it. "Something's wrong," he muttered, trying to look up at the roofs of all the neighboring buildings. Only a couple would be any good for snipers, and he didn't see any … but then, a good sniper would be virtually invisible.   
  
"Is that why you're fidgeting like a fucking three year old?" Yukio snapped.   
  
"Are you at all a bodyguard?"  
  
"It isn't my main description, but yeah, I can fill in."  
  
He wanted to laugh, but didn't dare. Fill in? Like you could do that and be halfway decent at your job. "We're being watched. I don't like this."  
  
"It's downtown Hong Kong, and we're in an expensive car. Yeah we're being watched, dipshit."  
  
He didn't snap at her - he wanted to, but he didn't. It would be wasted. This was so fucking wrong he could barely stand it. He decided to give Marc and Tony a couple of minutes, then he was going in after them. Fuck a couple of minutes; one minute. How long had they been gone?  
  
"No you are not," Yukio suddenly said, making him jump. "He told you to stay here - you stay here."  
  
"You ain't my boss."  
  
"If you want to keep your job, you'll keep your ass in the car."  
  
He gave her a hard look. Yukio stared back at him, unblinking and unforgiving. "You're really annoying."  
  
"So are you," she replied coldly.  
  
"Does this mean we're on a date?"  
  
"You wish, asshole."  
  
"Not really." Finally, he saw Marc and Tagawa emerge from the lawyer's office, but Marc had his hand inside his jacket, and seemed to be glancing around casually. Shit. "Start the car."  
  
"You're not my boss," she shot back.  
  
"Oh, god damn it, something's wrong. Start the fucking car." He popped open the door, and said, "You took long-"  
  
"Stay in the car," Tagawa said sharply in Japanese.  
  
Logan frowned at him, and shot back, in Japanese, "Why?"  
  
"Because I told you to," he responded. That sounded so unlike Tony he actually stayed in the car - how bad were things? Maybe she finally got the picture, because Yukio started the car.  
  
Marc literally shoved Tagawa into the backseat, and Logan had shoved himself over to the other side, so Tagawa was once more sandwiched between them. "What's going on?" Logan asked, in English, as Marc clamored in and slammed the door.  
  
"No fuckin' clue," Marc answered honestly, pulling out one of his Glocks.  
  
"I pissed off the Yakuza," Tagawa said.  
  
"I thought you already did that," Logan countered.  
  
"This was another one," he replied simply. "To his face."  
  
"Okay, yeah, I'm gonna assume that's askin' for it," Marc commented.  
  
Logan heard the whine of a motorcycle engine, rapidly approaching, and looked out the tinted rear windshield to see a helmeted man on a smaller motorcycle - maybe a Kawasaki, a Yamaha, something like that; he sometimes got those smaller bikes mixed up - but it was a dark bike, with a dark clad anonymous rider, and it set off mental alarms before he started reaching into his jacket. Drive by shooters on motorbikes occurred to him, brought out one of those strange cases of déjà vu. "Yukio, back up."  
  
"What?"  
  
"Reverse, fast, now!" He shouted, as he saw the man pull something out of his jacket. Something metal.  
  
"Do it!" Tagawa ordered.  
  
He was the boss, so she did what he said - she threw the car into reverse, and they jolted back, so quickly he could smell the burning rubber on the pavement.  
  
It startled the biker, who was expecting a stationary target - or at least one moving away from him, not towards him - but before he could swerve around, Logan threw open his door. The front of his tire caught the edge of the door, nearly yanking it off at the hinges, and sending the biker flying straight over his handlebars. Since he only had one hand on them anyways, he went catapulting through the air like a human cannonball as the bike clattered end over end towards the opposite side of the street, finally coming to rest against a parked car it hit so hard it embedded itself in its bumper, shattering the taillights.  
  
The biker wasn't so lucky. He went flying through the windshield of an oncoming car, and the driver was so startled he swerved and smashed into the curb and didn't stop until he hit the sidewalk, so violently the airbag deployed. The driver was moving; the driver was the only one for now.  
  
"Holy fuck!" Marcus exclaimed.   
  
Yukio had hit the brakes on impact, and he could see how wide her eyes were in the rearview mirror. "Shit."  
  
Logan got out, and said, "Drive. I'll meet you back at the flat."  
  
Tagawa, for the first time, looked startled. "What?"  
  
"Bud, you can't draw their fire on foot," Marc replied, not all that shocked. "They will take you down, and wipe out civilians."  
  
"I got a bike now, don't I?" He said, giving him an evil grin. Well, it wasn't a Harley, but it was probably better for crowded Hong Kong streets.  
  
Marc tossed him a gun, and Logan caught it, deciding not to argue with him about it now. It might come in handy. "I love you, you crazy motherfucker," Marc said with a rangy grin, giving him a wink.  
  
"Logan, don't - " Tagawa said, looking suddenly ashen with shock, but they had wasted too much time already. Logan kicked the slightly warped back door closed, and ran across the street to retrieve the bike as Yukio burned more rubber getting the hell out of here. He shoved the gun in his coat pocket, not sure why he was bothering to keep it.  
  
He had to yank the bike out from the car, and its rear bumper fell off and hit the street. Oops. The bike looked fine - some minor body damage, and its headlight was history, but who needed it now? It was day, although the light seemed corroded somehow, yellowed as if filtered through dirty clouds. It was appropriate.  
  
He had to kick start the damn thing twice - the first time it refused to start - the engine finally sputtered to life, then roared, as if it was pissed off. He felt like he'd been punched in the back, and figured from the scent of gunpowder in the exhaust choked air that he had been shot. The sniper finally taking the shot, huh? Good thing he didn't go for a head shot - he didn't need a migraine right this second. The shirt must have done its job, as the "punch" was all he felt.  
  
He straddled the bike and took off fast, weaving dangerously through downtown traffic, hoping the rear guard would be more interested in coming after him first. He took turns randomly, cutting into pedestrian alleys usually strewn with garbage, and while it may have been less than a macho ride, at least the small bike was highly maneuverable.  
  
Did he have ay fucking idea where he was or where he was going? He knew he must have been slightly northeast of the Chung Wan district, where Tetsuo's "secret" apartment was. He had to lose his pursuers before heading that way.  
  
Wait - lose them? He wasn't going to lose them - he was going to teach those fuckers a lesson. They wanted to pick on an old man? He was probably pretty old - they could pick on him.   
  
He was reasonably sure he had followers, judging from the honking and screeching brakes and smashing glass in his wake, and it made him strangely, angrily gleeful. But what was he going to do with them?  
  
The question became extremely important as he turned a corner, and hit a dead end. Well, not exactly - it was a side street so crammed full of bumper to bumper traffic, there was no room to move at all, not even on his streamlined bike. In fact, it was a market street, and many of the vendors had simply spread their make shift and ad hoc stalls into the street. Fortune tellers' tables lined the sidewalk, next to bamboo cages full of chickens and a rack of freestanding clothes that could have been wheeled straight out a department store. In fact, it almost looked like a movie set - all it needed was the fruit stand that would get kayoed by the ubiquitous car chase.   
  
  
  
He slued the bike around, about to double back and find an outlet that wasn't a virtual parking lot, only to find the narrow alley he slipped down immediately blocked off by a large black car .  
  
A large black car with the barrel of an automatic rifle sticking out its tinted window.   
  
"Oh, fuck me," he muttered, quickly looking for cover. "Everybody get down!" He shouted in Cantonese, the primary dialect of Hong Kong, as he threw himself off the bike and hit the street rolling. The gunshots followed obligingly in his wake, and one of the tires of the bike blew out with a sound like an M-16.   
  
There were screams and the sounds of panicked fleeing, almost but not quite drowning out the sound of bullets that continued to chew up the pavement maybe centimeters from the noodle hut he was sitting behind, using as cover from the alley. Ricochets screamed through the air like angry wasps, shattering glass and breaking fragile goods, possibly even pegging a chicken by the sound of it. Poor bastard never had a chance.  
  
He wondered if Marcus's gun was the one with the adamantium bullets - he was sure to get those bastards with a couple of random shots - but just as he sniffed the barrel to see if he detected adamantium, he sensed one of the panicked mob behind him. A man who put a gun barrel flush against the back of his skull. "Good night, white dog," the man said in perfect Cantonese, and pulled the trigger.  
  
It was like a fucking meteorite slammed into the back of his head, making him see stars and washing out his vision in shades of black and red. He almost lost consciousness, and may have for a second or two, but he forced himself to ride it out. It was hardly the first time he'd been shot in the head.   
  
Besides, the gunpowder burned, it ate into his skin like acid, and the bullet did tear own his scalp before ringing his metal skull like a dinner bell. He heard the man's gun clatter to the pavement, and he turned around, eyes still focusing, to see a neatly dressed Chinese man with a huge red stain discoloring his pale blue shirt, a stain that kept growing as Logan's eyes regained their clarity. The would be assassin looked down at him, eyes glazed, and staggered back, leaning hard against the wall to keep his balance. Blood now dripped from the end of his shirt, dark internal blood that spattered the ground like spilled ink. "Oh fu -" he began, then crumpled to the pavement, as loose limbed as a rag doll.  
  
You could call that either karma or a really unfortunate ricochet; depended on your point of view. That would teach him to shoot someone execution style in the back of the head. Okay, no it wouldn't, he was dead, but still …  
  
Logan grabbed the man's gun and shot blindly around the corner, aware that his would-be killer had just alerted him to a short cut he hadn't noticed before. It cut behind the noodle hut and what looked like a butcher's shop, forming a narrow alley that went who the hell knew where. It could lead him into another trap…but so fucking what? What did he have to lose here?  
  
He retreated into the warren of narrow back alleys, which was still slick with morning dew and a recent rinsing, and it was so narrow he sometimes had to turn sideways to walk through it. If anyone was following him, he wished them luck, as this was piss poor place for a gun battle.  
  
The gunfire finally stopped, and he guessed one of the guys in the car finally got the idea they were shooting at nothing. Good for them, stupid dumb asses.  
  
He felt a bit like a dumb ass as he worked his way through the maze, a little disoriented that something like this could exist in the heart of downtown Hong Kong. The maze existed like mushrooms at the base of the steel and glass skyscrapers dominating the Chung Wan skyline, like redwoods towering over the forest floor. He was beginning to wonder where the cops were - they were pretty strict, as was the general rule in Asian countries - but then he realized someone had been paid off well. There would be no cops today, or possibly ever … except, of course, to arrest him. He heard the "whup-whup" of rotors slicing the air, and glanced up, hardly believing it. Had they sent a helicopter after him? No fucking way! But what else could it be? Yukio could hardly have gotten back to where they stashed the chopper and come for him. Well, why not strafing from the air? More fun for everyone.  
  
Eventually the maze came to an end in a wider, dirty alley behind several buildings in what had to be the Central district. Through another cut through alley full of empty crates and garbage cans he could see thick, bumper to bumper traffic, and herds of people walking by on the sidewalk. On one hand, it was good: a hell of a lot of witnesses, some who might have money and power, and no one was driving away. But, on the negative side, there was a lot of potential collateral damage, and while the odds were he could get successfully lost in a crowd, he could also lose sight of an attacker before he was right on him - the problem with a crowd was sometimes his senses simply became overwhelmed; there were simply too many people, too many scents, and he knew damn well almost everybody would be staring at him.  
  
He shoved the gun he'd taken from his would be killer into his opposite coat pocket, so he now had two guns he had no intention of using again. On the bright side, though, if he ever felt the urge to re-enact a John Woo movie, he had the necessary tools.  
  
He ducked into the first open building, and almost instantly regretted it. He was almost overwhelmed by the smell of strong tea, people, old wood, boiling rice, and bird shit. It was one of those tea houses where bird lovers brought their feather friends to "meet" each other and show them off. Birds were considered good luck in Hong Kong, as well the occasional status symbol, depending on the bird. They sat on spare tables inside their bamboo cages, twittering songs as their owners drank tea, ate lunch, or played games - a couple of old guys were playing mahjong in the far corner, and a tinny radio somewhere was broadcasting the play by play of a cricket (!) match. A lot of people looked up as he came in, and a canary in a cage hanging near the entrance fluttered its wings and chirped at him in a startled manner, as if his appearance shocked it. At least the place was sparsely occupied, with not even ten patrons as of yet, and the doors were wide open, keeping a continuous flow of air in and out of the tea house. Of course, it held the dual purpose of keeping the bird scents from being overwhelming, and the humidity from building up inside the building to an intolerable degree, but it let him know there was a way out of here. He figured he could cut through buildings until he ran out of them, and then he could risk the street. If he thought he could take a true gamble, he could catch a cab, but it was undoubtedly faster on foot.  
  
He started walking through the wide, sparsely decorated tea house, he realized a man in a back booth by the kitchen was staring at him with a lot more hate than the situation warranted. He was young, with slightly tousled black hair and a handsomely insolent face, hunched over a cup of tea. He was wearing a white t-shirt that read, in bold black lettering across the chest "Let's So Bring It! On Down!" , an example of those incoherently mangled English "sayings" popular among the Japanese - it was often referred to as "Engrish", even by people fond of them. In fact, Logan suspected Marcus had a wardrobe full of those kinds of t-shirts - him and Bob both, come to think of it.   
  
Just because he was Japanese didn't make him Yakuza - but that hate filled stared, with just a hint of recognition, did. "Don't do this," Logan told him in Japanese. "Not here, not now."  
  
The boy - and he was a boy, probably twenty two if you were being extremely generous - jolted and sat back as if he'd slapped him. "I don't take orders from you, Yashida," he spat, his eyes narrow and deadly.   
  
It was Logan's turn to be surprised. Why did he call him Yashida? Did marrying into the family automatically make him one? Oh, wait, yeah, it probably did. There was a narrow "window" looking into the kitchen, and before the door swung open, Logan had caught a glimpse of someone too big to be a mere chef, and caught a whiff of gun oil in among the mélange of odors. "Everybody get out, now," he exclaimed in Cantonese, hoping they listened to him. The door swung open, and suddenly two tall, thin men - one Chinese, one Japanese, stood there, brandishing a Magnum and a Beretta, respectively.  
  
Just to mix it up, the kid in the Engrish shirt pulled out a silvered Glock, and said, "You gonna give up quietly, old man?"  
  
He glared at them, as he heard some of the patrons leaving, birds tweeting in distress as they were yanked up suddenly from the table. "Is that actually an option here?"  
  
The Engrish kid snorted derisively. "Nah. We just thought it would be funny to see you beg for mercy before we blew your fucking brains out."  
  
A third man, beefier than the other two, came up behind the guys in the kitchen doorway and looked out over their shoulders. "This is the guy?" He said, scoffing in disbelief. "What's the big fucking deal? He ain't even armed."  
  
"I'm not the one who's gonna be begging," he snarled, holding his arms out and springing the claws on both his hands.  
  
They all seemed to jolt en masse at the sight of his claws, and the beefy man said, in a humorously small voice, "Okay, I take that back," as Logan lunged claws first for the kitchen door. 


	8. Part 8

They opened fire before he could reach them, but as always it was a lost cause - the bullets bounced off the bulletproof shirt, or sliced through his skin and bounced off bone; either way, the worst they did was piss him off more. He slashed his right claw, shredding their guns and taking at least one of their fingers, and then slashed with his left, leaving deep cuts across their faces. Painful and bloody, but hardly life threatening. The two men in the doorway fell away, shouting in pain, and Logan spun and lunged at Engrish, who had stood up for a clearer shot.  
  
He shredded his gun and quickly withdrew the claws on his right hand as he seized the boy by the neck. He was scrawny, and no challenge at all. "Why did you call me Yashida?" He growled, shaking him like toy. "Do you know me? Do you?!"  
  
Engrish kicked him, but Logan was so jazzed on adrenaline he didn't even feel it. The boy's face was going red, and he was desperately trying to pry Logan's fingers from off his neck, but was having no success at all. "Dog," he spat, barely having enough air to speak. "Blood will out."  
  
Logan slammed him against the wall, so violently something fell and shattered on the floor. He didn't bother to look and see what. "What does that mean? What does that fucking mean, you cryptic asshole?!"  
  
The third man from the kitchen finally came out, but Logan only bothered to pay attention to him when he drove the butcher knife into his neck.  
  
Or tried to, at any rate. It just pierced his skin before the knife hit bone, and it snapped like it was made of glass. Logan tossed Engrish aside with enough force to knock all the residual wind out of him, and turned to face his would be knifer. Fuck, his neck actually hurt for a second.  
  
The beefy guy backed up, his mouth a startled O, still clutching the broken handle of the knife. Logan glared at him, eyes up and head down, and he was surprised the guy didn't wet himself, because he really looked like he wanted to. "Th-that metal goes all the way through, doesn't it?"  
  
Logan nodded. "Run."  
  
He didn't have to be told twice. He dropped the handle and ran out the door like his ass was on fire, and Logan turned back to Engrish, who threw his cup of steaming hot tea in his face. Logan flinched as the hot water instantly scalded his skin and stung one of his eyes, but he was angry he was able to ignore it. He grabbed the kid by his scrawny neck as his flesh continued to burn, and even the kid looked slightly startled as Logan felt the vision in his right eye go cloudy, and then start to slowly clear up again. He wondered how that must have looked, because Engrish - for once - appeared startled. "Do you know who I am?" He snarled, continuing to hold him by the throat and shake him.  
  
He grabbed his arm with both hands, try to ease the pressure on his neck, but from the way he sputtered, it wasn't working too well. "You're one of us. Yakuza. You do not walk away. You took our blood - we take yours."  
  
"You already took mine!" He roared. "You fucks murdered my wife!"  
  
"That whore-" That was as far as he got before Logan rammed his free claws into his shoulder, right where the arm fir into the socket. He screamed in pain, the end of it disappearing in a high pitched squeak. He could have let go of his throat, the boy was now impaled to the wall, but he had no desire to.  
  
"You don't say that about her," he growled, centimeters from his face. Inside him, he felt this big, dark well of emotions surging, rising, filling his blood with poison. He wanted to kill him; he wanted to rip his throat out with his teeth, and rip his limbs off without using his claws. He wanted to scatter his guts for the crows. "She was better than all of us, and you shits murdered her because you couldn't control her. I will kill each and every single one of you, do you hear me? Tell your masters to stay far away from me, or you're all dead."  
  
Engrish reeked of pain, of fear, a scent so sour Logan wrinkled his nose - and yet, his heart raced, as if it was thrilling to finally put the fear of Wolverine into his prey. "Y-you're dead. No one walks away from us -"  
  
Logan twisted his claws, just a little, and the guy made an inarticulate noise of hideous pain. Good. The smell of his blood as it cascaded down his arm was strangely satisfying. "I have no intention of walking away. I'm going to cut my way out. End this now, or swim home in your own blood."  
  
He wanted to kill him. He wanted to rip down and take his arm, and that would be merely the beginning: he would shred this guy like carrot - he'd rip him up into confetti. And it would feel so good, like coming home …  
  
Logan suddenly realized what he was thinking, and he was so startled he yanked his claw out and flung the guy aside. He yelped as he hit the dirty floor, bleeding copiously, and cradled his arm, which was just hanging on by a tendon or two. He knew where the hate came from, and he could almost hear Bob telling him 'It's okay, mate - they killed your wife in front of you. Everybody would want to kill them…' but it was more than that - he could feel that screaming, dark madness inside of him, not gone but lurking, waiting for a chance to take over once more.   
  
And the worst thing was part of him wanted it. When you were insane, there was no pain, no guilt … no conscience. You could do whatever you wanted, and none of it mattered to you. Your mind was Teflon, and it all washed off; the blood ran clear, and you felt nothing at all, except perhaps the joy of absolute freedom. Oh god.  
  
As Logan stood there, paralyzed with equal amounts of revulsion and desire, the shooting started.   
  
From the sound of it, at least four gunmen opened up from outside with Uzis and AK-47s, the dozens upon dozens of titanium and hollow point bullets punching through the walls of the teahouse like it was made of rice paper. Many bounced off the shirt, but there were so many bullets they also tore through his legs, his arms, his throat, and the scent of his own blood filled his nostrils, itched as it ran down his burning skin.  
  
He could have fought them, but he didn't - he ran through the kitchen door and headed for the back, running not for his life but his sanity.  
  
If there was any left.  
  
13  
  
The black hole's next appearance was in the Professor's form. Walking though, not in a chair, but it was no real surprise.  
  
He looked around the garden and frowned as if the flora personally offended him, then came up the chaise lounge where she was reading a book and catching a few rays of a sun far more friendly than the real one. "What do you think you're doing?" Ragnarok asked, as if it was his right to demand an answer.  
  
She waited until she finished her paragraph, then looked over the top of her paperback, sorry he was blocking her sun. "I'm running a triathalon. What does it look like I'm doing?"   
  
He gave her that empty, smug grin, that never change no matter the face he wore. "You're just giving up? Do you know how disappointing that is? I thought, as the avatar of Camaxtli, you'd have a little fight in you."  
  
"But you said there was no point in fighting you, and I believe you." She raised her book anew, and started reading again. She found it difficult to concentrate on the page - the text seemed to keep shifting, as if the book was constantly altering its identity. "You said yourself you're like a Chinese finger trap. And the only way to win there is not to fight, so I'm not going to."  
  
He snorted, and threw his hands up in surrender. "Just like that, huh? You figured out the mystery of the universe. Hate to crush you, little girl, but it doesn't work like that."  
  
"I'm sure it doesn't." She turned the page, tried to focus on the words that seemed to chase themselves around the edges of the pages.   
  
"Don't ignore me."  
  
"How can I if you keep pestering me?"  
  
"Why are you trying to piss me off? Do you really think I'll make it quick for you?"  
  
"I don't care what you do. Frankly, I'm just tired of you boring me to death."  
  
Unexpectedly, he grabbed her arm, making her drop her book. "I will not be ignored, bitch."  
  
She managed to yank her arm away, but honestly didn't know how. "And I will not be called names by an empty freak of nature."  
  
"You're the only freak here, child. I am of nature - I'm much more natural than you are." It seemed odd coming from the Professor, even though the empty eye sockets gave it away as not him.   
  
"Good for you. Go be natural somewhere else." The sky was red and roiling with fire, the grounds overgrown and green, more like a jungle than a garden, all like she had left it. But it no longer felt like her own, and she loathed it. He had no right to turn her mental sanctuary into a mockery.  
  
Suddenly she felt a deep and terrible pain in her head, like someone had driven a knife made of ice through her cerebral cortex, and winced, as she felt oddly tired and cold. Weak.   
  
"You are insolence at my sufferance," he snapped, his voice an unusual mix of Charles and inhuman. "You exist at my sufferance. I think you need a lesson in how little you mean, Human."  
  
The landscape had taken on a curious fluidity, like it was becoming gelatin, but just as suddenly it seemed to solidify in an abrupt, steady wave. The abyss must have felt it, because he suddenly grabbed her by the throat and hauled her to her feet.   
  
"Now now now, I thought you knew better than to play with your food," Bob said, abruptly joining them.  
  
As much as she hated him, it was almost a relief to see him. The void - and he felt colder than a freezer; arctic - held her in front of him like a Human shield. "You! How did you get in here?"  
  
That made Bob raise an eyebrow at him. "I'm a god. Few doors are closed to me."  
  
"I am not a door."  
  
Bob shrugged expansively, as if he was humoring Ragnarok. "Fair enough. But you're done here, okay mate? Toddle on your way."  
  
Did Bob actually think that had a chance of working? The void tossed her onto the ground, and she could do nothing but fall. She had the flu once, and she remembered staying in bed only because she didn't think she had the strength to stand. She felt that way again, and she hated it. "I don't have to go anywhere, Power. As supposed gods go, you're not very smart, are you "Bob"?" The funny thing was, she could actually hear the quotation marks.  
  
She shoved herself up to her hands when a hand closed around her arm and helped her up. It was Bob, of course, and as soon as she was sure she might keep her balance, she ripped her arm away and gave him a hateful look. This wouldn't be happening if it wasn't for him. He grimaced as if he was apologetic, but she wasn't about to buy it.  
  
He turned his electric blue gaze on the void, and asked, "What are you implyin' here?"  
  
The abyss smiled, that ravenous, open, empty grin, and Jean got a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. Something was wrong. "I'm not implying anything, Bob-o. I'm an eater, a devourer of gods … and you just walked in the door."  
  
Bob's eyes narrowed, and he crossed his arms over his chest. She could swear he was now mimicking Logan's arm, borrowing the brawn to look more imposing, or he had really been working out. "Don't push your luck."  
  
"Push my luck?" He chuckled. It sounded hollow, like he was laughing at the bottom of a deep well. "Do I really believe Eris has some kind of passive resistance traps to scuttle me? She spreads those rumors herself to keep us in line. And everybody knows how much Osiris hates your fucking guts, and after what you did to him, no one blames him. He ain't gonna come in and save your ass. Face it , Bob, you gambled big - and you just lost."  
  
Bob simply glared at him, unimpressed, and said, "We're leaving. Deal with it."  
  
But that's when the whole landscape suddenly turned to stone, the sky crashing down in the form of cylindrical and impossibly high metal walls. Now she knew what a bug in a jar felt like. "You're not going anywhere," Ragnarok said, relishing his power.  
  
Oh fuck. Just when she thought things couldn't get any worse, now it seemed she was going to die with Bob.   
  
14  
  
It took him a little while to remember where he was supposed to be going, or even what country he was in.  
  
He slashed his way through a few Yakuza and Triad, got shot a couple of times - well, maybe more than that - and found some back alleys to run into, before he found another maze of market streets and got lost. Or at least he was pretty sure he was lost. He had no fucking idea where he was, and in spite of the blood loss, no one was following him. Every now and then, he still heard the helicopter, but it was unlikely it could pick him out of a crowd.  
  
He knew he'd heal up, but he felt dizzy, and figured it was the loss of blood. Logan found a small back alley, overflowing with trash, and crouched beside a dumpster that blocked him from general view. He just needed to rest for a second, let his healing factor kick into overdrive, and he would be okay. He was sure he'd be okay.  
  
What the fuck was wrong with him? It felt like … it felt like something had opened up inside of him, but something he didn't want to know, didn't want to remember. He felt raw, exposed, on the verge of losing whatever semblance of control he had. But he'd always been on the verge, hadn't he? Civility - sanity - was such a fragile thing for him, and he had these decades of hate that had just been festering in his soul, and he never knew it. No, he did know it - he just thought he could control it. But now he got a glimpse of the beast within him, and realized it was just waiting for that weak moment, that loss of control, and it would come forth again, be back in the driver's seat … and part of him still wanted to give up to it. They would pay; if he let that thing out, they'd all be dead by sundown, no doubt about it. But he had no guarantees he would surface again any time soon if he did just that - or if he'd even want to. How many times could you let madness swallow you whole?   
  
It had started to rain, the misty kind that just left you damp and uncomfortable, the kind that never cut the heat. He glanced down at a small puddle on the cracked pavement, and blood dripped from his nose in the water. He watched the bead of red disperse, diffuse into pink and fade, and suddenly it seemed familiar. He remembered … what did he remember?  
  
He closed his eyes, just giving himself a moment to be still.  
  
He saw blood again, dripping in water, diffusing, but this time in a bathroom sink, a marble one with silver fixtures. He felt a sharp pain in his back that quickly went away as something was pulled out, and he leaned against the sink, trying to ride out the wave of pain and exhaustion. "Oh, damn it," a woman cursed behind him. Mariko. "Did I hurt you?"  
  
He would have laughed, but was too tired. His whole body felt bruised, in spite of the feverish heat of healing. "No. You weren't the one who hit me with a car."  
  
"It wasn't you they were aiming for."  
  
"Yeah, well, they got me anyways." He stumbled into the bedroom and collapsed on the bed, too exhausted to do anything else. He needed sleep. Multiple broken bones really took it out of him.  
  
He heard her throw something metallic in a plastic trash can, and then she ranted a bit. He heard her anger, and knew it was partially aimed at him ("I'm not a nurse, goddamn it!"), but mainly it was just anger he heard, no specific words. Perhaps if he had more energy he would have fought with her, but he just let her vent. What else could he do?  
  
It was day time, and it surprised him. Was he out that long? Perhaps. The sunlight was gold, though, just rising, and the birds seemed far too cheerful and loud for this early in the day. He supposed he had to cut the birds some slack - unlike him, they were usually thrilled to find they had lived another day. (Actually, they were all just shouting the bird equivalent of "Mine! Mine mine mine mine!" but who was he to spoil a romantic notion?)  
  
Soon she joined him. He was laying on his side - the side without the broken ribs - so he couldn't see her, but he felt the shift of the mattress, the heat of her skin against his back, although ironically he was so hot she felt cool. She pulled the blanket over them both, and sighed - he could feel her breath like a breeze against his neck. "How many times have I said I hate this?" She wondered.  
  
He wasn't sure he had the strength to talk again, so he held up his hand and showed four fingers. Actually, it was probably ten times that, but he was hoping he could make her laugh. She didn't, but she put her arm around his waist and pressed up against his back. Her skin was cool (to him), her touch was soothing, and he felt himself relax even though he wasn't aware he was tense. That was probably automatic, a reflex against pain. Who didn't tense before a major hit? "I hate to see you hurt, Logan. It isn't right."  
  
He had to speak. "None of this is right," he muttered, mostly into the pillow. "That's not the point."  
  
"What is the point?" She was now running her fingers through his hair, stroking his scalp, quite possibly searching for cuts. But it felt good anyways.  
  
"Keeping you safe. That's all that matters."  
  
"No it isn't. You may be hard to kill, but you still feel pain, and you don't need to subject yourself to so much of it. Look, let me hire someone else, maybe -"  
  
"No. For hire guys are untrustworthy. If you can buy them, so can the Takabes. It's a risk we can't take."  
  
"Who says? You might be my husband, but I'm the boss around here."  
  
"I've noticed."  
  
"And I don't care if it's a conflict of interest, I'm tired of seeing you hurt."  
  
"This is what I can do, Riko. Let me do it."  
  
"What you can do? Get hurt?"  
  
He huffed a sigh into t he pillow, wishing he had the energy to get pissed off. He was mostly healed, but sometimes those internal injuries could be a bear. "Protect you. It's all I'm good for. I fight; I do it well. Let me do it."  
  
"What the hell is that shit? 'All you're good for…'"  
  
"Hon," he began, somewhat cross, then stopped. Should he tell her? He wasn't sure, and right now he felt vaguely delirious. Could his own healing factor give him a high fever? Or maybe it was just the blood loss, or both. "You have to understand … I've done some bad things in my life. Not deliberately, not usually. I always meant well, at least in the beginning …" he scoffed at his own words. "There's my epitaph: 'He meant well.' But I did, and I've done things that I know I can be proud of, even though the world's never gonna give me credit for it."  
  
"Because you were a spy? Or something like that. Don't be shocked - it wasn't hard to figure out what you were trying to tell me in the kitchen that night." She let out a weary exhale. "I married James Bond."  
  
He couldn't quite laugh yet, but he nearly did. "I ain't James Bond, never was. Maybe some other guys were, but not me. I was the guy they sent in when James Bond failed."  
  
"What do you mean?"  
  
"Nothing; it's better you don't know. Let's just say I started out doin' nothin' but good - or what seemed good - and then people started to catch on that every time I was sent on a suicide mission, I was the only one who ever came back. It was never a contest; it was never even close. So some of the higher ups … they learned to exploit that, they started settin' me up for things where my ability to survive would end up doin' 'em favors … I probably ended up makin' it easy for them to set me up, I don't know. But I know I did things I regret, and I shoulda left a long time 'fore I did.I just thought … shit, I dunno what I thought. But you, keeping you from harm … that makes me feel like I'm finally doing some good again."  
  
She was quiet for a long time, the hyperactive songs of birds flitting around the cherry tree outside their bedroom window filling the room as the molten light of the sun spilled across the floor like a stain. He cool fingers continued to stroke his skin, creating goosebumps on his burning skin, and sending the smallest thrill of pleasure throughout his body. Did she know how comforting she could be to him? Probably not; it might have scared her a bit if she did. Finally, she said, "Why, sweetheart? I don't understand."  
  
"You're one of the finest people I've ever known, Riko. I don't know many people who could be surrounded by all this corruption and not be tainted by it. Even I ... I've fallen prey to it before, in the past. But you've never given in, and I admire that more than I can say."  
  
"You're giving me way too much credit there, sweetie. Not that I don't love you for it, but still - "  
  
"I'm not. Trust me, I'm not. I know people, and I know that if you weren't stuck here, trying to sort through the train wreck of this family, you could change the world."  
  
She was silent for another long moment. "Okay, see, now I know you're overstating the case -"  
  
He grabbed her hand and kissed it, closing his eyes against the golden light, feeling like his consciousness simply wanted to sink down, drag him into nothingness with it. It was not a bad idea. "I'm not. Maybe one day, you'll get to prove that. If I continue to do my job. I think I'm gonna pass out now."  
  
She sighed, her breath a cool breeze against his back. Her fingers trailed down his chest, and he could feel her lips at his ear. "I love you, Logan," she whispered, giving him a small kiss.  
  
Logan opened his eyes, and found himself staring at a ripped poster for some kind of drag cabaret, the picture of the transvestite star of the show torn in half down the middle, the bottom of the poster shredded and dripping in the rain. He didn't know if he was crying again or if was the drizzle, which felt like it was crawling through his hair like insects, but he thought for a moment he might actually throw up. He wasn't sure he could.  
  
As it turned out, he didn't - he managed to ride out the wave of nausea, and while he wanted to blame the bullets, he didn't think he could. Was that part of the reason why he found it so hard to let go? Mariko wasn't just his wife; he saw her as the key to his salvation, the redemption of his damned soul. And yet, he failed her and himself.   
  
Not only that, but it was some colossal joke all along. Salvation for him? After all he had done? Unlikely. He was a killer then, and he was a killer now. It had oozed into his bloodstream like a disease, and he wasn't going to be rid of it any time soon - or ever. He was what he was, what he had always been. The Yakuza hated him not for what he had done, but for simply being a better killer than eight thousand of them combined could ever be. He felt nauseous again.  
  
He stood up on rubbery legs, pretty sure he was mostly healed, but feeling weak all the same. He wiped the rain - and he chose to believe that's what it was - off his face, and tried to get his bearings. He knew he was in the Chung Wan district. There were hundreds of skyscrapers, but he was sure he could find the one he wanted. And then he'd ... what would he do? What could he do? Just make sure everyone was still alive, and get them intact to the airport. He still felt slightly delirious, off kilter. Either his healing factor had induced a high fever, or there was something on those bullets besides gunpowder and metal.  
  
He should have never come to Hong Kong - he knew that now. And he never should have let the Senior Partners into his head, no matter how good the cause ...  
  
Wait a second. Why had he thought that?  
  
He considered that for several seconds, but the bisected picture of the drag queen was unable to give him any other clues. So he wandered off, losing himself in the crowds, feeling like he was back in New York again - a New York where everyone spoke Cantonese, but still ...  
  
Logan wondered why a person who was a lost cause was always the last to know it.  
  
15  
  
Well, that was a fun thing he was never going to do again. Marcus mentally added that to his list, and marveled at how fucking big it was.  
  
Yukio was a hell of a defensive driver - or a bad driver, depending completely on your point of view - although he was pretty sure Logan's grandstanding distracted the bad guys and pulled them off. As far as Marcus could tell, they weren't followed, and he was able to get Tony back to Tetsuo's safe house unmolested.  
  
But Tony himself was upset. He kept insisting that he go after Logan. Marcus just stared at him in disbelief, and pointed out, "Logan can take care of himself. Better than most of the world, in fact. He doesn't need me to save his hairy ass." Well, not from amateurs like the Yakuza and the Triad anyways. The Organization would be a different story.   
  
But Tony was really wrought out. He was now pacing the floor, as opposed to what he did in the car, which was fidget like a three year old after a lunch of Pop Rocks and Coke Slurpees. "But the Yakuza, they ... and the Triad! They're expert killers, and do you know how many of them there are out there?"  
  
Marcus shook his head. "I'm worried more about them than Logan. He'll make those punk ass bitches look like stooges they are. They don't know hardcore, they only think they do." But this was curious, wasn't it? He figured Tony knew Logan was a mutant, just like he knew he was a mutant - it just wasn't something discussed by polite people. Could he have overheard some of their conversation on the plane, about the Yakuza maybe wanting a piece of Logan?  
  
No, that wasn't likely. That whole jet was pretty much soundproofed. He just didn't know that Logan's mutation made him all but impervious to bullets. (Well, except maybe that bullet in the eye, but judging Logan's reflexes and the odds of it in a street level gun battle, a shot like that had to be one in a zillion.) He tried to reassure him, but never mentioned Logan's mutation … and why not exactly? Just because Tony never mentioned it, he never mentioned it? He wasn't ashamed of being a mutant. Hell, he was more proud of being a mutant than he was his chosen line of work.  
  
He could tell himself it was a privacy issue - it was Logan's issue to bring up or not. And it was; he didn't want to violate the little sense of trust he and Logan had cultivated. But it made it hard as hell to calm Tony down. Finally, he told him, "If he ain't back in five minutes, I'll go look for him." He didn't bother to point out he had no idea how he'd look for him, as Tony could probably care less. What was his thing with Logan, though? There was something going on there, but he hadn't gotten a complete handle on what. He didn't want to be suspicious of Tony - Tony was one of the rare good guys. But still there was something wrong about his reaction here.  
  
As soon as the old man finally sat down, still as tense as a hairless rabbit in a cosmetics testing lab, Marcus asked, "Wanna drink?" as he quickly got behind the bar. He really didn't care if Tony wanted one or not - he wanted one.  
  
"No thank you," Tony replied crisply, brusque but still polite. He was seated nervously on the edge of the sofa, eyes always straying towards the door.  
  
"Fuck yeah, I wanna whiskey," Yukio replied.  
  
"You're drivin'," Marc pointed out, crouching down behind the bar. "I'll give you apricot nectar."  
  
"Fuck you."  
  
"You ain't my type, honey," he responded wryly, looking over the available bottles. Tetsuo sure liked scotch didn't he? And gin. Why gin? That was one liquor he could never quite get the hang of. Marc moved bottles aside, searching deep on the lower shelf for something decent to drink that wasn't scotch. "I'm watching you and Fidel Castro in the sand, assassin …" he sang under his breath, as he spotted a bottle of white rum. Oh hell yeah - jackpot.   
  
But when he pulled the bottle out from the shelf, something in the back caught the light.  
  
It was a transitory glint, something he could have mistaken for a reflection off the window in any other circumstances, but right now it was raining, and there were no windows down here. He shoved more bottles aside, and saw something that looked like a foil brick crammed far in the back of the bar's lowest shelf. A silver box of some kind?   
  
And that's when he heard the noise at the door. 


	9. Part 9

He stood up quickly, pulling out two guns and aiming them towards the door as it opened, and Logan stumbled in. "Next time announce yourself," Marcus snapped, holstering his guns. "I almost filled your ass full of lead."  
  
"Everyone needs more lead in their diet," Logan replied faintly. It was probably a joke, but he didn't sound good.  
  
"Jesus fucking Christ," Yukio said, standing up from her chair.  
  
Logan's jeans were now streaked dark with blood, and it was striped on his face like misapplied war paint. There were multiple small holes in his jeans and leather jacket that could only be bullet holes, and while most were caked with blood, he wasn't actively bleeding anywhere they could see. His throat was crusted with dried blood, like a vampire had tried to make a meal out of him. But none of that actually bothered Marcus, as he'd seen Logan physically worse - what bothered him was the look in his eye.  
  
It was akin to that hollow eyed stare, that one he saw after Leonie's murder. It wasn't quite that gone - a hundred yard stare as opposed to a thousand - but Marcus could still see it, that precipice of madness that he balanced on like a gymnast on a beam. What the hell could have caused that? Certainly not slicing through gangster trash. Had they used Mariko against him somehow? Oh shit, did they know who he was? Were they more than prepared to throw her memory in his face, unbalance him, catch him off guard? He didn't think they were that subtle or that clever.   
  
"Should we, uh, call a doctor?" Tony offered hesitantly. "I know of one -"  
  
"I don't need no doctor," Logan replied gruffly, staggering towards the bar. Marc didn't think he was hurt - still healing maybe, depending on how many bullets he took and where - but not necessarily hurt, not in a physical way. Logan collapsed on a bar stool, and Marcus asked, "Wanna drink?"  
  
He grunted an affirmative. Marc reached down, grabbed the bottle of white rum, and slid it down towards him. Wordlessly, Logan twisted the cap off, and took a deep swig from the bottle.  
  
"Uh, guy, you're riddled with bullets," Yukio pointed out, looking paler than usual. He hoped if she was going to ralph, she had the decency to leave the room.   
  
Something metallic hit the floor, and Marcus hoped that was just the bottle cap, and not a compacted bullet being forced out of Logan's body. That was a tough thing to explain away. "I'm always riddled with somethin'," Logan replied coolly, shoving the bottle of rum back down towards him. "Tastes like syrup."  
  
Marc shrugged, picking up the bottle. "It's rum. It's supposed to taste like that, but it has a kick like a mule."  
  
"I wouldn't know."  
  
Oh shit, right. He wouldn't. Marcus took a swig - it did taste syrupy warm - and passed it back down to him before crouching back behind the bar. "What happened, man?"  
  
Logan was in full on taciturn mode. "Guys came after me. I made them sorry they did. I wasn't followed."  
  
Marcus wanted to say "Well, duh, ya gotta live to follow someone," but he didn't. Logan wouldn't appreciate it, not in mixed company.  
  
"Um, look, I don't like the guy, but are we really gonna let him bleed to death?" Yukio asked, still standing, as if she was afraid to sit down.  
  
"He's not bleeding," Tony pointed out, his voice unusually inflectionless.   
  
"I'm good," Logan said, without looking behind him. It was a lie, of course; no one with an empty stare like that was ever "okay", but now was not the time to get into it.   
  
Marcus grabbed the silver box he found on the lowest shelf, and, setting it front of Logan, whispered under his breath, "This doesn't smell like an explosive to you, does it?"  
  
Logan's green eyes flicked up at him, a new awareness flashing briefly through them, as if he finally saw him. He then looked down at the silver box. It was about the size of a cigar box, with three intertwined dragons embossed on the front, looking like a knot of serpents. "Smells chemical, but not explosive," Logan said, and let his bloody fingers (was that his blood, or someone else's?) trace over the top. "Three dragons," he muttered.  
  
"Does that mean something I should know about?" He asked him.  
  
It took a moment, but Logan shook his head, and seemed to bust himself out of his inexplicable reverie by opening the box.  
  
Tony got up, as if startled, and said, "What do you have there?"  
  
The box was filled with that fitted plastic lined with blue velvet, like you might get from a jewelry shop, only it wasn't cradling jewelry. It was instead cradling a rectangular glass bottle, the size of a small flask, filled with a liquid that had a pale lilac blush. Logan's nose wrinkled, but not like it smelled bad - it was like he was trying to separate scents, parse them. And Marc knew he could, in a way that was completely creepy - no offense to him. "It's not booze, is it?" Marcus guessed.  
  
Logan shook his head. "It's … wrong."  
  
What a funny thing to say. "Wrong?"  
  
Tony looked down at it, and although his brow furrowed, Marcus wasn't convinced he was all that stunned. "It's probably more of Tetsuo's collection."  
  
Before Marcus could ask him to clarify - collection of what? - Logan said, "Drugs. It's a drug, but … it doesn't smell like any I'm familiar with."  
  
"Smell?" Yukio cracked. "You go around smelling drugs? Is blood loss making you gaga? Did you get shot in the head?"  
  
That brought up an interesting point: Yukio was having a hard time buying all of this, Logan just walking in the door gunshot and bloody but A-okay, while Tony was having no trouble at all. Now, admittedly, he was a cool customer by nature, but still, wasn't this at all suspicious? Marcus fixed Tony with a scrutinizing look, and asked, "Was Tetsuo into R&D at all?"  
  
Tony reluctantly met his eyes, and once again, he cultivated such serenity he was impossible to read. "I have no idea. But I know he liked to sample the merchandise."   
  
"What kind of drug is it? Any clue?" He was asking Logan, but he was also asking Tony. How much did he know about his brother's - his family's - sideline?   
  
Tony answered first. Was he nervous? "I believe they were working on a new opium derivative."  
  
"It smells like magic," Logan said, eying the bottle suspiciously.  
  
"Now what the hell is that supposed to mean?" Yukio wondered. She finally got up and wandered over, but kept her distance, as if afraid Logan would bleed all over her. "C'mon, guys, we have to call him an ambulance."  
  
At least Tony finally looked mildly surprised. But it was Marc who asked, "What's that mean, bud?"   
  
"Smells demonic," he said, not really clarifying. Or was he? "Smells akin to what I found at Yasha's place."  
  
"What did you find at Yasha's place? Drugs?"  
  
Logan suddenly cocked his head to the side, like a dog that just heard a can opening in the next room, and he looked up, as if expecting someone to fall through the ceiling.  
  
"Demonic?" Yukio scoffed. "Jesus, can't you tell this guy is gone -"  
  
"Shh," Logan hissed sharply.  
  
"What?" Marcus asked, aware that Logan was picking up on something that the rest of them weren't aware of yet. Maybe it was kind of creepy, but you couldn't beat him as an early warning system. He snuck a hand inside his jacket and grabbed one of his guns, and while everyone was looking at Logan, he snatched up the bottle of whatever it was with his other hand, and slipped it into his pocket.   
  
Then Marcus heard it, or at least thought he did - a faint thrum, a mechanical noise tamped down greatly by the soundproofing in the building materials. It also seemed like the large picture window, looking out of a building rich segment of the Hong Kong skyline, was starting to waver. "Shit!" Logan cursed angrily. "Down! Everybody get d-"  
  
But before he could finish the sentence, the helicopter became visible.  
  
Marc grabbed Tony and dragged him behind the bar while Logan launched himself across the room, tackling Yukio and carrying both of them behind the couch, as the entire window shattered with a thunderous noise. The rum bottle exploded like a Molotov cocktail, raining liquor down on them like a sudden squall.   
  
Bullets and shards of glass flew everywhere, the backwash of the rotors blowing into the room like a hurricane, and the fuckers had machine guns: through the open hatch, they were emptying dozens of rounds a second into the room. They were punching through the bar, leaving gaping holes in the wood, and Marcus was sure he felt the wind of several bullets pass by his face and arms. Shit! Who gave the Yakuza a fucking battle chopper?!  
  
He risked getting up his knees and shot towards the copter, hoping for a lucky hit. This was the gun with the adamantium bullets; it just had to punch through one right thing, and it was all over. Marc got off two shots before two bullets tore through his arm. Blood splashed warm on his face, and he almost lost his grip on his gun, but he managed to hold on. But fuck if it didn't hurt; it felt like his entire forearm was on fire, and he really didn't know how much longer he'd be able to use it.  
  
He heard Yukio yell, over the seemingly endless battle noise, "What the fuck-?!" and glanced over the bar cautiously, hoping a projectile didn't pick that moment to take his skull off.  
  
He should have guessed; he should have known. That hollow look in Logan's eyes was frightening for a damn good reason; Logan without restraints- without a care whether he lived or died or simply suffered - was a terrifying thing.   
  
He ran straight into the hail of bullets, claws out and his blood splattering as bullets chewed threw him and out, body jerking involuntarily under the impact of multiple rounds, but Logan didn't slow down, he didn't stop. And Marcus had no idea he could run so fast.  
  
With a roar that sounded inhuman, he lunged out the window, jumping straight for the helicopter.  
  
16  
  
Bob really did take his blasé act too far sometimes.  
  
The fact that he seemed to be stuck in a giant tin can specifically made for holding gods didn't even make him blink. He just stared blandly at Ragnarok, who seemed disappointed he couldn't get more of a reaction out of him. Finally, Bob huffed a sigh out of his nose, and said, "You really think I'm that stupid? That's an ego blow."  
  
The abyss glared at him, as best as an eyeless void could. "You just refuse to admit you're beaten, don't you?"  
  
"Beaten? Oh, I doubt it. Ya see, I knew you might try something like this, and Sy isn't he only elemental I know - just the only one who would bother dealing with the likes of you."  
  
"Uh huh. And I'm supposed to start shaking in my boots now, is that it?"  
  
And that's when Jean felt their reality shift.  
  
The metal cylinder that made up their world melted like an ice cream sundae in the sun, giving way to a mist shrouded landscape full of rolling lavender hills and oddly shaped trees that looked like crosses between banyan trees and twisted witch hazel. The ground was beautiful, a combination of metallics, copper and green and red and black, but on closer inspection … the ground was moving.  
  
With a shock of fear and revulsion, she realized the ground beneath them all was alive.  
  
Alive, and starting to flow up the legs of Ragnarok. They broke from solid colors into a living mass of multi-colored snakes, and she took a step back, unable to conceal her disgust. She could take snakes one at a time, but as many as these - hundreds; the landscape was roiling with hundreds of snakes, thousands, millions upon millions - was just too much to bear. She was not a big fan of reptiles.   
  
Neither was the abyss, judging by the way his face twisted in disgust, and he tried to brush them off. He did, but for all he swept off, about six took their place. "If you wanna start fartin' sparks, you'd better start now," Bob advised, grinning maniacally.   
  
"How the fuck..?!" he spat, still trying to brush off the invading snakes. But they started to crawl into his skin, through his slender shell, filling him up - and they kept on going. Apparently the snakes had no fear of a consumptive, cold emptiness.  
  
A group of snakes formed a huge pile just to the left of the abyss, and suddenly melded into one another, forming a human shape. Tangerine sized silver eyes floated up to the surface of a multi-colored, scaled face, but he was mostly cobra black, with rings of red, copper, green, and silver on his limbs and throat, encircling his torso and face. "Welcome to Kauvadra Hills," the snake man said, possibly to her. He(?) then turned his eyes towards the abyss, who was now covered up to his waist in a growing pile of snakes, and said, "I bet this is a let down, eater. But my snakes will be happy to keep you company."  
  
"Jean, this is Degei, the Fijian serpent god of the dead. Deg, this is Jean, Camaxtli's avatar."  
  
Degei bowed slightly at the waist, an elegant, old fashioned greeting, and Jean didn't know what to do. It was all she could do to keep the revulsion off her face. (Although she was glad he didn't offer to shake hands.) "Nice to meet you," he replied. His voice had an elegant lilt to it.  
  
"You - you can't do this!" The abyss cried, pulling off handfuls of snakes. It made no difference; the pile didn't reduce one iota. The entire lower half of his body was obscured by serpents.  
  
"Oh, he can," Bob replied smoothly. "He's an elemental death god, as well as one of the few to exist simultaneously in all of the multi-verses at once. He is the many and the one. Ain't that a kick in the pants? He's a peace lover, but he could cream your fucking hollow ass. Let us go, or find out what it's like to be drowned by a zillion snakes."  
  
Degei glared at him with his flat, serpentine eyes. "I hate you eaters. You're all so arrogant." As if this was their cue, snakes started to burrow straight out of the void's "skin", instead of into him, out of him. They sprung from his chest like veins that decided it was time to vacate the premises. It didn't appear to hurt him - how could you hurt nothingness? - but he appeared as disgusted as the rest of them.  
  
"Stop this!" Ragnarok cried, appalled and clearly terrified, as snakes continued to swarm into him and out of him, again and again, skin shell healing up instantaneously - but for no good at all. He was now up to his rib cage in serpents, and they were threading through him like darning needles. It seemed impossible, this was a god eater, so how could snakes ..?  
  
But it was more than that, wasn't it? Jean started to understand this man - god/snake/thing/whatever - might not have been prone to violence, and may have been obscure (she'd never heard of him, and Ragnarok didn't seem that familiar with him), but he was quite possibly the most powerful god in existence. It's just his powers - whatever they were, beyond "calling" snakes - were beyond the realm of what the eater could handle. It was so far beyond the pale of normal god powers that it was at a complete loss. (If he was made up of snakes, did that mean - since the ground was made of snakes - that he was the entire planet/dimension/whatever? Was he his own planet? And what did that mean exactly?)  
  
"I got wiring loose inside my head, I got books that I never ever read," Bob sang softly, almost cooing, and she looked to see he was singing right into the face of a large coral snake that was wrapped around his left arm. The snake's black eyes were locked on Bob's, its split tongue darting out occasionally to taste the air, and it seemed thoroughly enraptured by him. He also seemed to be fond of the deadly thing as well. "I got secrets in my garden shed, I got a scar where all my urges bled -"  
  
Jean backed away, feeling the ground move beneath her as snakes - trod on but never apparently harmed - shifted position. Now Ragnarok was visible only from the shoulders up in the writhing mound of serpents. This was madness; she was sure she was still locked in her head and imagining this. This was insane! And simply too bizarre to be real. But she honestly didn't think her imagination was this good - or grotesque.   
  
"I'll release them if you stop this!" Ragnarok finally shouted, a thin green garter snake working its way out of the empty hole where his right eye should have been.  
  
Could you throw up in a non-corporeal form? Because Jean was afraid she was about to find out. 


	10. Part 9 and a half

17  
  
It was hard to run when your body wanted to give way, when your muscles were shredded by bullets and your internal organs were sliced open and pulped by high velocity projectiles. But if you were riding your anger, you could. Or at least Logan could.  
  
And riding it really was what it felt like. A great black beast, much wilder and more lethal than any horse, pushing him to his limits and beyond. It was madness, pure and simple, insanity that made you greater than you were simply by the deeply delusion belief that nothing could hold you back, but as Bob had told him in the past, belief was nine-tenths of anything.   
  
He didn't know if he had control of his madness, and he really didn't care. All he could feel was a gnawing, acidic hate as he ran through the bullets, wanting nothing more than to hurt those fuckers. His hate was a swollen, angry black river that he let him carry him away into the unknown. They had taken enough from him, they had killed Mariko -  
  
- (they had killed him) -  
  
- and they weren't taking any more. It stopped now, even if he had to be shredded down to a metal skeleton, a skinless beast that couldn't be recognized as Human. He didn't care.  
  
Blood bubbled in his chest as at least one bullet hit his lung, traveled out and through his back, but he didn't stop. Oxygen was overrated - all he needed was adrenaline and rage. Everything else was superfluous.  
  
Even though a bad bounce of a bullet sliced through his Achilles tendon, he was able to ignore the pain and the sudden weakness of his right leg -  
  
- (What pain? He was a ball of fire, nothing but endless burning, nerves in overload, too much, too fast) -  
  
- and let the personal velocity of momentum and rage carry him to the edge, where he sprung for the helicopter.  
  
He extended his body to full, even though he was a bigger target for bullets, and felt - for one single second - that he was actually flying, thirty stories off the ground and sailing through the air like gravity had finally decided to stop punishing him - and he heard one of the men yelling over the contained explosions of gun shots to "Pull up! Pull up!" as he knew what Logan knew only a millisecond later.  
  
He was going to make it.  
  
Logan jumped not only into the open side of the chopper, but straight into one of the shooters. He took a bullet in the face for the trouble - it tore through one cheek and went right out the other, taking one of his teeth with it; powder burns made his eyes water - but Logan drove one claw straight into the gunman's heart as they both sprawled on the floor of the chopper. He didn't just stop shooting; he stopped living.  
  
The helicopter slewed wildly - both sudden extra weight and general panic; he could smell it, taste it, feel it pouring down his throat like wine - and even though he was still on the floor, claw buried deep in the dead man (who wore a bulletproof vest - too bad it wasn't adamantium proof), he kicked the gun out of the hands of his partner, who was shifting aim towards him. It went flying out of the chopper, and Logan followed up with a blistering kick to the man's face: unlike most other times, he didn't hold back - he got him full strength.  
  
There was a crack that even Logan's gunfire numbed ears could hear, and the man hit the floor of the chopper convulsing slightly, blood spurting from his crushed nose. Logan figured he'd split the guy's skull straight down the middle, busted it like a piñata, but he didn't care. No, that was incorrect, he did care.  
  
He was glad. He was almost laughing.  
  
He could almost feel the weight of his anger - his insanity? - shifting around the inside of his head, loose contents jarred in transit, and he ached like a motherfucker. His body was on fire with agony, making him see red, making him seethe. Part of him wanted - needed - to find a hole to crawl into, to collapse, to be safe while his body undertook its long and frantic healing process … but he knew the moment he gave in, he would be out for a very long time. He was too damaged, too badly hurt; he could taste blood and gunpowder in his mouth, his guts were on fire from organs attempting to knit themselves back together (the shirt could only stand up to gunfire for so long - now it was tatters, and the only thing completely covering his chest was blood ), his chest still bubbled with blood when he attempted to take a breath. (Full breaths were right out, but as long as he kept it shallow, sips of air, he was okay.)  
  
It was his traitorous body that was turning the tide here, keeping the beast at bay - it could no longer take what he - it - was asking of it. But Logan didn't want to be sane right now. He couldn't be sane. It wouldn't help.  
  
He staggered to the cockpit as the pilot swung the chopper back towards home base (wherever that was), and the pilot pulled a handgun out from under the control panel, but not in time. Logan slashed it to scrap with a single swipe of his claw, and retracted them into his left hand in time to grab the asshole by the throat. He let a single claw out to poke him under his Adam's apple, for added leverage, but he hardly needed to. The pilot pissed himself staring up at him, eyes almost all white, jaw so slack he was going to start drooling in a second. He was terrified by him, almost paralyzed, and he was a fucking gangster.  
  
Logan wondered how bad he looked. Covered in blood, holes still in the face? He knew his eyes were healed; he could see fine. He probably didn't look Human anymore, or at least not like any Human you'd ever want to meet.   
  
"Put the chopper down now," he growled, feeling blood ooze out of his mouth when he spoke. He couldn't do anything about it, so he just let it happen, and the stink of fear coming off the guy increased thirty fold. He wanted to bust out a window to get some fresher air in here. "Put it down or I'm shoving you out and taking it down myself." The guy was now shaking in his seat, unable to look away, so Logan shoved him brutally towards the control panel, breaking the spell. "Now!"  
  
The pilot did as he was told, and Logan was glad, because he honestly didn't know how long he was going to be able to stay conscious.  
  
He wondered if he'd wake up again. He wondered if he should care. 


	11. Part 10

18  
  
"He did not do that!" Yukio insisted, sounding almost angry about it. "He did not fucking do that!"  
  
Even Marc had to admit - if only to himself - that he had a hard time believing what just happened. Logan was like a living video game character sometimes.   
  
As soon as Logan made it to the chopper, the shooting stopped - well, at least for them - and the chopper veered off shakily, dramatically, and something dark went flying out of the chopper. Marc was pretty sure it was a machine gun.   
  
"What did he do?" Tony asked, as he got up off the floor. He was cut with some glass shards, but it didn't look like he had been shot. Marc kept his gun out, but switched it to is other hand - there were fringe benefits to being ambidextrous. His shot arm was hurting a little bit near the wrist, where the bullets had plowed through, but the blood that was dribbling from the wounds was not spurting, so it wasn't arterial. That was good, but the rest of his arm was numb, which was a bad thing.   
  
Yukio might have been shot - she was splattered with blood - but it was impossible to tell, because she'd been grabbed by Logan, and nearest to him when he lunged for the copter. It could have been all Logan's blood. She stared at her boss, still wide eyed and ashen in shock. "What did he do? That … moron jumped into the helicopter!"  
  
"Moron?" Marcus repeated, fixing her with an icy stare.   
  
She gesticulated wildly towards the broken window, eyes wide. It took her a moment to find her words. "Th-that is not something a smart person would do! In fact … holy shit, he ain't human, is he?"  
  
"We have to go," he replied, not about to get into this with her now. "Are you hurt?"  
  
"What?"  
  
He repeated himself, but this time sounded as pissed off as he felt. "Are - you - hurt?"  
  
She scowled at him. "Well how the hell should I know?! Doesn't it at all bother you that your friend ran into a hail of bullets - and was not immediately killed - and took down a chopper? Fucking 'ey, what kinda thing is he? And … things came out of his hands! I swear something came out of his hands …" Her gaze was sharp, accusing. "He's one of them, isn't he?"  
  
He met her gaze with equal force. "Them? Them?! What, are they fucking giant ants?"  
  
"Enough!" Tony snapped, with such vehemence they both jumped. The old guy had a thin line of blood trickling down from his hairline, where he got a good nick from the flying glass, but all he did was wipe it away with the back of his hand. His eyes looked hard, like steel, and it was the angriest he had ever seen him. "I don't care what he is, he just saved all our lives. Would you have asked him only to do it if he were an average Human?"  
  
Yukio seemed startled, probably because she had inadvertently annoyed the shit out of her boss, which was never a good career move. "I didn't - I mean, did you see him? I was -"  
  
"We need to find out if he's still alive," Tony snapped, cutting her off and turning towards the door.   
  
"We need to get outta here anyways," Marc agreed, quickly taking the lead. He had to make sure the hallway was clear before he let Tony out into it. Yukio scrambled to catch up with them. "Cover's definitely blown now. And if it's any consolation, I can guarantee Logan's still alive. I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess he's in piss poor shape, but still among the breathing." And that was only because he wasn't sure how much of Logan had to be gone before his body actually stopped. If you could believe the stories he'd heard - about Logan specifically and the few crumbs he'd picked up about the pseudo-mythical "Weapon X" - Logan had been blown up, burned, dropped from mid-air, and actually killed (well, for a few seconds or so), and yet he had a tendency not to stay dead. How the fuck did he do that? If someone could harness his healing abilities and maybe spread the wealth around, near-immortality would stop being the realm of science fiction. Oh, and vampires. (He was still having a hard time with that.)  
  
The hall was clear - the hall was, in fact, perforated. But wasn't it unusually quite? No screaming, no incidental noise, not even someone exclaiming the Chinese version of "What the fuck?" The Triad must have used its connections to clear the floor. Lucky floor.  
  
They made it to the elevator, and Marcus cradled his injured, bleeding arm against his body, Glock held securely in his left hand. As they began the long descent to the ground floor, he wondered what shape they'd find Logan in. He really hoped they wouldn't have to go pick up pieces of him, because they were frankly having a hard enough time.  
  
***  
  
At least they didn't have to look very hard to find him.  
  
The helicopter that attacked them - that Logan had presumably commandeered - had put down in a parking lot just slightly North of the building. Broken glass glittered on the pavement, and it was strewn like a diamond path for them to follow to the downed craft. It looked like an evacuation chopper gone Goth, painted black and rendered anonymous, and the crowds were torn between fleeing in horror of catching a bad ricochet - or being called on as a witness - while still others gawked, as if waiting for something even more interesting to happen. Marc spotted a couple of digital camcorders among them. He did his best to shield them from it, and, to his disgust, had to holster his gun again.   
  
Still, they seemed to be the only ones brave enough to walk up to the chopper, and once they did, a Chinese guy in a loose, blood smeared flight suit came out, saying something in Chinese. Marc had no idea what, but it sounded like a lie. He just nodded as if in sympathy, and then hauled off and punched the sucker square across the jaw. He went down like a cheap hooker on the Sunset Strip, and from the force with which he hit the pavement, he probably wasn't getting up any time soon. Good.  
  
"Did you know what he was saying?" Tony asked.   
  
"No. Did you?"  
  
"No. But I didn't deck him."  
  
"He came out of the chopper, and the blood on him wasn't his. My guess was he was a bad guy who didn't recognize the guys he shot at." As he neared the open hatch of the 'copter, he said, "Hey guy, it's us. You still alive in there?"  
  
It was silly to say "It's us" - Logan surely knew that already, having heard them or maybe even smelled them. Still, if he was really out of it, he might forget they were the good guys.  
  
Marc smelled the blood as soon as he started to climb in the hatch, and wasn't surprised to find it splashed all over the interior. It smelled like a fucking charnel house, and of the two bodies laying there, one was quite obviously dead. The other guy wasn't dead yet, but was actively bleeding from every orifice in his face, and he didn't look good. His piano playing days were probably over.  
  
Marc kicked the dead guy out of the chopper, and grabbed the injured guy and dragged him out. Well, considering how badly hurt he was, it was highly unlikely he could make things much worse. When would these idiots learn you did not piss off Logan? Seriously, they deserved this if they hadn't figured out that going after him was as bad as bear baiting. Actually, probably worse; bears would probably be taken down by a machine gun team.  
  
Yukio made a disgusted noise once she got a whiff of the place, and if Tony was disgusted, he kept silent about it. Marcus clamored deeper into the chopper, wondering where Logan could possibly be. "Bud?" Could he have run off once it landed?   
  
He heard a noise, a sort of grunt, and found Logan sitting in the co-pilot's chair. He looked like he was wearing a red shirt that came with a matching veil, covering most of his face - but it was just blood, probably his judging from the holes still in his skin. One was so wide and deep, he could actually see a glimpse of a silver metal rib. He grimaced in empathy - fuck, that had to hurt - but then he realized Logan had roughly a dozen ragged bullet holes in him, covering his chest and arms, with one on his face and two in his gut (and one of those was still oozing blood), and they hadn't healed closed yet. They should have, shouldn't they? Logan's eyes were no longer empty, but glassy with pain. "It's a bitch when the adrenaline wears off," he said, his voice sounding … odd. Far away, fragile, soft. There was also a strange liquid tone to it as well.  
  
Marc suddenly forgot about the pain in his own arm. "Why aren't you healing?"  
  
It didn't look like his pupils were focusing correctly. Only then did Marc notice he was sitting on the very edge of the seat, careful not to touch anything with his skin. " I am. It's just there's so much damage, it's takin' a while."  
  
"We can take you to a doctor. Surely Tony knows one who can handle mutants -"  
  
"Can't help me," he said, almost shaking his head but thinking better of it. "I just gotta … gotta have some time." He put his hand on the top of the seat, as if preparing to stand, and he let out an aborted sigh that could have been a kind of laugh. "It hurts to breathe. I had no idea that could happen to me."  
  
Yukio came up behind him, and asked, as she pushed her way past Marc, "What pissed in here? Smells like a urinal -" She then let out a harsh, hard gasp, and he knew she had just seen Logan. "Oh fucking Christ. Are you -"  
  
" 'M leaving," he said, hauling himself to his feet. He made a noise deep in his throat, a swallowed groan of pain, and wavered on his feet before he even stood up all the way. "Oh, not good -" he gasped, and then keeled right over.  
  
Marc caught him before he could hit the floor, and it occurred to him that Logan was probably the only guy who could make him feel like a wimp. He could easily bench press three hundred pounds, no problem at all, but Logan's dead weight almost sent him falling over. And Logan was twitching as he hauled him out of the cockpit and into the main body of the chopper, and he suddenly wondered if he was having a seizure. Could he have a seizure? Well, why the hell couldn't he?   
  
As he laid him out on the blood slicked floor, Yukio continued to gape at them from the cockpit. "How in the hell is he still alive?"   
  
"Can you fly this damn thing?" Marc snapped at her.  
  
At least that got an evil look out of her. "Yeah."  
  
"Then do it, get us to the airport." When she made no move to do anything, he added, "We're sitting ducks here! C'mon!"  
  
Tony nodded at her, and she turned back, prepping the chopper for launch. Tony was standing near the tail, away from the open door (that was smart), hand over his mouth. It was hard to say if he was just stunned or trying hard not to vomit from the stench, the sight of Logan, or both.  
  
Marc knelt down on the floor, so he could keep Logan steady while the chopper lifted off. He propped Logan's head on his thigh, and wished immediately that he hadn't. The guy was burning up; Logan was so hot his hair was already slick with sweat, beads tinged red with blood oozing down the side of his face. Marc found the heat of him almost unbearable. How could a person get this hot and survive it?  
  
His muscles were twitching so violently beneath his skin it looked like they were trying to punch their way out of him, and he was occasionally making this low noise in his throat, kind of like a growl. "You still with us, man?" He asked. When there was no immediate response, he gently pried open one of his eyelids to check, and found only white. He was out cold.   
  
Christ. This wasn't what he thought it was, was it? He wasn't still reacting to the pain even though he was unconscious, was he? Oh shit.  
  
"Why did he do this?" Tony asked, in a breathless, small voice.   
  
Marc looked up at him, scowling. "Oh, come on! You know damn well why! Haven't you figured it out by now? He's not like me; he's not just in it for the pay check. He helps people because he wants to. I don't know why - I don't think he knows why. Considering what they've done to him, he's got more reasons to be jaded about them than I do, but it doesn't make a difference." He realized he said too much - "What they did to him" - but there was no turning back now. "He will do whatever it takes to get the job done, even if it kills him."  
  
The chopper lifted off, and Tony grabbed a metal protrusion on the inside of the chopper's hull to keep his balance. He really did look whey faced and on the verge of getting ill. "I - I didn't want it to be this way. I didn't want … I didn't want anyone to get hurt."  
  
"Going up against the Yakuza and the Triad? No offense, but fuck you! Most people who oppose them end up dead. I knew taking this job getting hurt was a given. I just didn't expect Logan to take the brunt of it." He then looked down at his face - he had a perfectly round bullet hole in his right cheek - and sighed. "But I should have, shouldn't I? He usually does." And figuring he had a grudge against the Yakuza, he felt like a total fucking moron. He just didn't want to see it. There were a lot of things he didn't want to see. His philosophy professor would be so disappointed in him. Then again, his philosophy professor would probably be disappointed in him killing people, in general. "He's a fucking superhero, and I'm a bloody rent-a-thug. We have different behavioral mandates."  
  
"You're not a thug, Marcus."  
  
"The hell I ain't. It's what I'm good at." Logan continued to smolder and twitch, body complete dead weight, blood still oozing from the torn wound in his gut. He had to look on the positive side, though - at least this was the only wound actively bleeding. But how much blood had he lost altogether?  
  
He dropped his hand from the side of his sweaty head, and hit something heavy in his own left side coat pocket. What the hell was that? Then he remembered - the drug he snagged from Tetsuo's place. Marc pulled the bottle out of his pocket, relieved to find it had come through the assault intact, and said, "Tell me the truth about this, Tony."  
  
He looked at him with mild surprise, and Marc didn't like seeing that much emotion on his face. It was out of character. "I have."  
  
"Not completely, no. You knew about this, didn't you? What the fuck is it, and is this why the Yakuza and the Triad want Tetsuo's "assets" so bad? Considering Logan could be dying right now 'cause of it, I want the fucking truth."  
  
Pressing the guilt buttons was cheap and manipulative, but fuck it; he felt like he was getting a first degree burn from Logan's head. (It suddenly occurred to him … was this why those Organization fucks liked keeping Logan in tanks of fluid? He always assumed it had something to do with keeping the adamantium liquid and pliable - but what if it was just to keep Logan's body temperature down, to keep his healing factor at a more leisurely pace, or just prevent him from literally baking? Would throwing him in a bathtub full of ice water help at this point?)  
  
Something in Tony's expression resolved as he glanced down at Logan, and he closed his eyes, as if unable to witness the damage firsthand. Logan did look pretty much like road kill at this point. "It's called Anodyne."  
  
That rang a bell, but it took Marc a moment to place it. A line from an old piece of writing, he couldn't remember by whom (some old white guy, extremely long since dead): 'The anodyne draught of oblivion.' Now there was a drink he wanted to try. "Painkiller. It's an old word for painkiller, right?"  
  
Tony nodded, looking away before opening his eyes. "Yes, I believe so. From what I've been able to piece together, Tetsuo discovered a "connection" who could help him manufacture a new opium derivative more addictive than heroin, and with far more narcotic power. But he kept the exact formula - and connection - secret. I can't even find references to either in the papers he did leave behind. But he was terribly excited about it - and earning a strange amount of money for it, and it hadn't even hit the market. I think that was what led to his death. Someone was paying him to get Anodyne out there, someone neither Yakuza or Triad, but an unknown entity."  
  
That didn't make a lot of sense to Marcus, but then he remembered what Logan had said before the shooting started: "It smells like magic. Demonic …" And the case that inadvertently brought Logan and Tony together for the first time involved something like a demon mob in Japan trying to muscle the Yakuza out of its territory, right? Oh shit - this all made a perverse kind of sense now, didn't it?  
  
Didn't it?  
  
"Anodyne does more than addict people. Or it just addicts them and leaves them helpless in some way." Prey to demons? Perhaps. Or just more vulnerable to the big masterminds, whoever they were. And you had to give this big bad - whatever they were - credit for big brass balls - they'd helped unite the Yakuza and the Triad, with the ultimate goal of destroying them. They were not afraid of them, even as a combined unit. And why should they be? There were some demons immune to bullets.  
  
Tony gave him a suspicious sidelong glance. "Who would do such a thing?"  
  
"I'm not sure yet," he lied. "How much Anodyne is there?"  
  
"In my brother's possession? I think you have it all there. I found a small vial of a similar substance in with some of my brother's effects, but a lab in Vancouver has been trying to analyze it for weeks. All they can t ell me is its an ultra-concentrated opium derivative, full of rather benign herbs that make no logical sense being included in the mixture, and some other things not yet identified."  
  
Yep, that sounded like something magical, and possibly demonic. He wished Logan was awake, because he knew a bit more about this kind of shit than he did. (And what the hell was the connection with Yasha anyways?) Then it occurred to him exactly what he was holding in his hand. "Have subjects survived taking this? Do you know?"  
  
Tony nodded. "That's how Tetsuo knew the drug was so powerful. I believe he sampled it himself."  
  
"And got addicted? That's fucking stupid."  
  
"He wasn't known for his brains."  
  
"Is that what killed him?"  
  
"I have no idea. I'm honestly leaning more towards murder. He could have angered the wrong people in either group - or among his "connections"."  
  
Shit yeah; there were some demons you just didn't want to fuck with. Of course, if he was their conduit to spreading this to the world, why would they kill him? Unless … unless they decided they wanted to deal with someone else, someone with more power in the Yakuza or the Triad, or someone personally more trustworthy. "You wouldn't happen to know if it had antipyretic qualities, do you?"  
  
"What? I would-" Tony looked at him sharply then, eyes widening in shock. "What are you planning to do?"  
  
"Something undoubtedly stupid." He forced his injured hand to work, and pulled off the cap. There was a faint odor of musk and … wormwood? Maybe. It was herbal but pungent, and not something you expected. "Logan's in a lot of pain, and he doesn't get addicted to things."  
  
"But this isn't like anything else in the world."  
  
"Neither is his immune system. Hit him with a drug once, and he's immune. You think he's stubborn? He's just mimicking his basic biology." He wondered if there was something in it - demonic, magical - that could actually hurt him. It would be a unique combination if it could. Shit - did he have any idea what he was about to do?  
  
But Logan continued to twitch and groan on the floor, and he realized he had little choice. He couldn't stand to see him hurting like this.   
  
"Aw shit, I hope I don't make things worse," he grumbled to himself, measuring out a portion of the lilac fluid inside its own shallow cap.   
  
"You love him?" Tony asked, although it didn't sound much like a question.  
  
That was a surprising comment. "No. He's my friend, the only one I trust implicitly. And if he got used because of me, I'm gonna be so fucking pissed off."  
  
"Used? What -"  
  
"How long have you known? Huh?"  
  
"Known what?"  
  
Marc glared at him. "Do I have to spell it out for you? C'mon - how long have you known about Logan?"  
  
He was quiet for several moments, but he didn't look away, and Tony had no choice but to give up. "I only knew he was the mononoke shortly after I met him."  
  
It took him a moment to place that reference. Mononoke … angry ghost, right. The nickname for the guy who wiped out the Yashida and Takabe crime families. Logan, in other words. "And you knew he was how? Because his name was Logan?"  
  
"His name was Logan, his Japanese was impeccable - not just language, but mannerisms as well. He knew a lot for a man who supposedly had never been to Japan. It was … suspicious."  
  
"That didn't make him the guy."  
  
After a hesitant pause, he admitted, "I discovered there were photographs from that era through a contact. They're not good photos, but it is him. He hasn't aged a day."  
  
"So that's when you figured he was a mutant."  
  
He grimaced, and glanced away again. "Either that, or he had an excellent plastic surgeon."  
  
Marc glowered at his profile, and was suddenly pissed off enough to consider drawing his gun. Son of a bitch. If Logan wasn't keeping him down on the floor, he'd have gone over there and smacked the shit out of him. "He was your threat against the Yakuza, wasn't he?"  
  
Tony shook his head. "No, Marcus, you -"  
  
"You fucking used him as a bargaining chip!" He interrupted angrily. One of the things he liked about Tony was he was always thinking three steps ahead of everyone else; the guy was a born mastermind. But that was a dual edge sword, wasn't it? "The Yakuza still have a revenge hard on for him, and you knew if you brought him with you, he'd be an extra sword to dangle over their heads! He was an additional threat, 'cause he wiped them out before. How could you fucking do that, man?"  
  
Tony looked shamed, which was god - he should be fucking ashamed of himself. "I never thought it would come to this. I underestimated their desire to corner the market on Anodyne, and overestimated their general intelligence."  
  
"And underestimated their desire to snuff both you and Logan out, no matter the cost. Jesus fucking Christ …" He was so angry it was hard to think, but he forced himself to do it. "When this is all over, when he wakes up, you're gonna give Logan everything you have on that mononoke era shit, and you're gonna explain how you fucked up here, got that? If you wanna keep any professional relationship with me at all, this is the only way to do it. Comprende?"  
  
Tony glanced down at the blood splattered floor and nodded, a portrait of humiliation. Good. "I don't have much, but that's easily done."  
  
"You bet your ass it is." He turned back to the anodyne he had measured out in the lid. It was maybe one fourth of a teaspoon, not much, but he didn't know if it was too little, or too damn much. He didn't know what the side effects of this could be - if any. It was highly unlikely they'd infect Logan anyways - his body was just too hostile an environment (much like his personality), and he did have some Bob energy still in him, right? That should take out anything demonically sinister. (He hoped…)  
  
"Here goes nothin'," he said, pouring the meager amount of fluid into his mouth. "Hope I didn't just kill ya." He bet that was something Logan would have a difficult time forgiving.  
  
He had time to recap the bottle and put it away before it started to have any visible effect on him. At first it was like a ripple effect: his muscles stopped spasming from the upper body down, and those troubling noises stopped issuing from his throat. His body seemed to relax in stages, and while he was still sweating like the world's fattest man in the world's hottest sauna, from surface appearance alone, he seemed better. Marc felt for his pulse on his throat, and found it easily. A minute before it had been pounding like a jackhammer, as if it too was trying to get the hell out of him and find a more friendly, less injury prone body, but it had calmed now. It was still too fast and heart attack hard, but nothing like before. It seemed survivable.   
  
Marc hoped that was true. Because if he just damned Logan to some new form of hell, he bet Helga would kick his ass. 


	12. Part 11

19  
  
She was still not accustomed to violent reality shifts, even though she could easily pull them off herself. Maybe it was just Bob; maybe he had a way of transitioning that was deliberately disorienting. She wouldn't put it past him.   
  
One minute they were in the world of snakes, and the next, she was stumbling into a bookcase in the eternal library, golden vines withdrawing as if afraid of being touched by her. Bob seemed to keep his footing, but then he knew they were making the jump. "Thanks for the assist, Sy," he said cheerfully.  
  
The creepy figure of Osiris turned away from his book on the pedestal, only to give Bob a flat eyed glare. "I did not assist you."  
  
"I know. Ever hear of sarcasm? You should use it sometime. Might loosen up your sphincter." Bob then clapped his hands together and rubbed them, a noise loud enough in this sepulchral place to make her jump, and she saw, much to her chagrin, that Osiris had reacted the same way. "Well, Jean, where do ya wanna go?"  
  
She glowered at him, unable to believe what he was asking. "Are you asking me to go somewhere with you?"  
  
Bob held his hands wide, as if granting her the world. "Yes. Now, I know you may not like me much now-"  
  
"Now? As opposed to always?"  
  
He ignored that. "- but it had to be done. You can go home now, you know."  
  
"I always could."  
  
"Not without causing an apocalypse, darlin'."  
  
"So? They can be stopped."  
  
He widened his eyes at her in disbelief, and it was probably meant to be somewhat comical, but it didn't strike her that way. Nothing about him was particularly funny - not in an amusing way, at the least. "Okay. See, you just proved my point."  
  
"What point? That you're an asshole?" Out of the corner of her eyes, she saw the golden vines slinking back down, straightening the books she had inadvertently knocked askew.  
  
"No. No one should have to stop an apocalypse because you got a hankerin' for Chunky Monkey. People died last time, Jean. In fact, I believe you returnin' to Earth to kill some set this all off."  
  
She tried to will her hatred into a palpable force, into something that could reach out and crush his skull, but she felt muzzy, like her head was jammed full of cotton wool. It was his fault, of course - turning the eater on her. "If you had protected Logan like you should have, I wouldn't have had to save him."  
  
"Usually he doesn't need saving." Bob's eyes turned suddenly hard, setting into stone. "And none of it excuses you killing everyone you found."  
  
"Do you know what they were going to do to him? What they were doing to him when I found him? What they had done to many mutants? The fact that the whole city wasn't rendered a crater in the ground is testament to my restraint." Maybe she did lose her temper a bit, but she wasn't about to admit it to this pompous, self-important shithead.  
  
"Did it ever occur to you that there are worse things than death?"  
  
"Hey," Osiris piped up. "I'd appreciate you not trying to kill my business."  
  
Bob raised an eyebrow at that, grimacing in distaste. If Osiris was going for a pun, then she agreed with him there. "Your business is always good. You could do without a customer or two."  
  
"Says you."  
  
"Fuck off, Bob!" She shouted, not about to stand here and tolerate a bitching contest between these two weirdoes. "I am not a child, and I don't require a lecture from you. You thought I was "dangerous"? Fine, you solved that "problem". Now get the fuck out of my face."  
  
The amount of vitriol seemed to surprise him, which proved exactly what a self-important piece of shit he was. He was the "good guy", and therefore he couldn't have done something wrong, even when he did. He held up his hands in mock surrender, took a step back. "Look, Jean -"  
  
"Why aren't you gone yet?" She snapped bitterly.  
  
He sighed, dropping his hands to his sides. "You can't transport between dimensions that easily anymore; possibly not at all for the moment. That eater was a psycho. I'm the only one who can get you out of here."  
  
"I'm certainly not," Osiris added snidely.  
  
"I don't care. I'm not going anywhere with you."  
  
He rolled his eyes, shoulders sagging. "Well, I guess Degei will be bringing the abyss back soon, once he's done teachin' it a lesson. But I got the impression you didn't like snakes."  
  
"I like them more than you."  
  
He ran a hand through his hair, and seemed to relent with a shrug. "Fine. But I hope you think this over. I'm really not your enemy."  
  
"You could fool me."  
  
He shrugged again, with his hands this time, and the look on his face was subdued, almost sorry. "We all do what we have to do, Jean. And I just couldn't bring myself to killing you." And with that, reality seemed to fold around him, making him disappear as if he'd never really been there at all.  
  
She let out a breath she didn't realize she'd been holding, and leaned back against books that smelled both musty and slightly decayed, and were as warm as flesh against her back. How she hated that … thing. And he seemed to be "bonding" himself Logan. Didn't he, of all people, understand Bob was setting him up for a fall? Bob had plans for him, and no god's plans were ever good for Humans. It just didn't work like that. And who would know that better than her?  
  
"You hate him as much as I do, don't you?" Osiris asked, breaking the silence.  
  
She looked at the oddly skeletal, eerie looking god, who managed to be misshapen yet still far too Humanoid for his own good, and scowled at him. "What gave you that idea, genius?"  
  
He smirked, which looked very unsettling with his bloodless slash of a mouth. "There is a way to make him pay."  
  
"If there?"  
  
"Yes. If we work together."  
  
She knew better than to trust him, but the idea of getting even with Bob was undeniably appealing. "Will it be violent?"  
  
Osiris grinned, flashing a large set of needle thin teeth. "Of course. It wouldn't be fun if it wasn't."  
  
Maybe he was a god, and a weak, easily bullied one at that, but no one said she had to like him, or even trust him. She only had to deal with him long enough to hurt Bob.  
  
Then he could fuck off and die, just like the rest of them.  
  
20  
  
Something was terribly wrong, and he knew it.  
  
But he didn't care. Quite the opposite, in fact. He never wanted it to be right again.  
  
He had a memory of pain … no, that wasn't the right word for it. Agony, perhaps. It felt like his nerves were frayed, on fire, his body full of molten shrapnel, some of it piercing him from outside in, and from inside out. It was a universe of pain, but one he was used to - again, if he didn't hurt, did he know for certain that he was still alive? He could taste blood and metal in his mouth, and something else … something redolent of earth and age, sharp flora and mold.  
  
But then something odd started to happen. It was like a warm wave started to sweep through his body, washing away the pain, leaving behind a curious sensation of pleasure. He felt completely enervated, but in a good way, a sort of post-coital way. He was aware he was unconscious - possibly worse - but again, he didn't care. He wasn't dreaming, but he was. A hallucination? No, that didn't seem right either. Something like both, and something like neither.   
  
He would see a ceiling above him, and then a sky, and then both at once. This visual dissonance didn't bother him in the least. Why couldn't they co-exist? His skin felt like it was rippling, gaining its own sentience, warmed by a sun he couldn't see.  
  
Mariko was there. She was laying beside him on the grass - on the bed; both and neither - he could smell her skin, feel her, and she was melting into him. Literally melting - their flesh was merging, melting together, nerves reaching out like tendrils, entwining, meshing. She started to fill him up even as he diminished, and he realized she was always with him - she had never left him. He was living for her, he just didn't remember. He hadn't been just himself for a long time.  
  
And how could he have been? He'd been a hollow man, chewed up and spit out by so many things. How could he be anything but a pastiche, a mosaic man, a collection of cobbled together feelings and parts, because whatever he had been died a long time ago. He just gathered what he could to fill the void, to make him feel like he was still Human, still functioning, still sane … or at least close enough to pass. He was just the shell that was left, the thing that operated on pure instinct, but felt rudderless and terrified if it didn't have something else, something that didn't make him realize he was so damn hollow, so empty and alone.  
  
His vision was gone, reduced to a smear of bright colors, a pulsing smudge of light in his head, carrying the percussive tattoo of his bloodstream. Or someone's - it wasn't clear, and he didn't know. He didn't care either.  
  
Had he ever been sane? He wondered, but right now he didn't care. He was being reduced to nothing, melted into nothing but random sensations, and it was perfectly okay by him. Yes, it was wrong. It was wrong to feel like he was becoming vapor, something light and fragile and deliquescing on the wind. But it felt so good.  
  
If he was dying, he never wanted to live again.  
  
****  
  
Brendan had never seen an actual demon bar, and didn't know if he was disappointed or terrified. Probably a bit of both.  
  
He opened the door to be slammed by music so loud he didn't understand how he hadn't heard it outside ( and it was My Bloody Valentine - ha! Demons had irony?), and have a sea of a half a dozen faces swivel towards him. Deeply inhuman faces. And maybe not a face at all - was that a pile of slime in the corner?  
  
Did it just move?!  
  
Suddenly a woman slunk (and she did - she slunk. He never saw anyone do that before) up beside him and put her arm around his, pulling him deeper into the bar. "Hey there honey, you look new," she said, giving him an encouraging smile. She was a pretty young Latina in a red velvet half shirt that looked like little more than a fancy sports bra and a tight black leather mini-skirt with a slit up the side. Even if you considered the spider web patterned stockings and stilettos she wore clothes, she was hardly wearing much at all. Except perfume, so thick it was about to make him sneeze, and in spite of that, he knew she didn't smell right.  
  
He tried to tug away from her, and she stopped, scrutinizing him with a wrinkled nose, like he was the one that smelled bad. "You're not completely Human, are you?"  
  
He sniffed hard, and said, "No, I'm half-Brachen." To demonstrate, he let his useless red spikes come out, just for a second. He was learning to control it, but strong emotions still made it come out on his own. That would be embarrassing on dates if he didn't get his act together soon.  
  
Her dark eyes remained placid and unimpressed. "Half? A whole half? Not just a quarter or somethin'?"  
  
"No. What are you?"  
  
She made a clicking noise with her tongue and turned away, letting him go. "Blood's too bitter, then. Damn it! When do the Humans get here?"  
  
"Precisely what part of "demon only bar" aren't you getting, Lupe?" A somewhat familiar voice said. A green woman emerged from a shadowy hallway in the back, wearing a ratty AC/DC t-shirt that looked about one size too small for her, and low slung blue jeans that gave everyone a glimpse of her extremely green belly. Her tail twitched behind her impatiently as she glared at the vampire. "They don't."  
  
"I hear they do sometimes," Lupe answered, sounding a little snotty. He was suddenly positive she used to be a Valley girl.  
  
"Even if so, see the bar policy?" She pointed behind the semi-circular wooden bar at the front of the room, over the shoulder of an utterly huge Samoan bartender, and Brendan eventually realized she was pointing at a sign that said, in big letters and many languages (only one he recognized), 'Take Your Kills Outside'. Was it him, or was the fact that they needed an actual policy about it far from comforting? "You wana go Human hunting, you do it away from here."  
  
She sneered ever so slightly, and then cast a coquettish look at the big bartender. "You're a Human, aren't you, tiger? What say you and I go get acquainted?"  
  
The bartender - who must have been six six if he was an inch, and three hundred pounds if he was an ounce - just gave her a gimlet eyed look, like she was an annoying pest five seconds away from being swatted. Lupe must have realized how lamed she seemed, because she rolled her eyes and looked away, strutting towards the door. "Fine. I'll just go find a more interesting bar. This place is dead anyways."  
  
"So are you," Helga pointed out, as she sashayed her butt out of the bar. Her name was Helga, right?  
  
As soon as Lupe was gone, the green woman's green eyes appraised him. "Oh, hey - one of the mutant kids. You're name's, uh … Brandon?"  
  
"Brendan."  
  
She shrugged. "Close enough. You're too young to be here."  
  
That surprised him. "Uh, this is a demon bar. Since when do you follow Human laws?"  
  
"Since when I feel like it," she replied tartly. "Ain't you supposed to be in New York anyways?" She then got a funny look on her face. "Logan around here?"  
  
"No - or at least not that I know of. He sent me here, though."  
  
"To the bar?"  
  
"No, to Los Angeles. To Angel's actually -" The tension jumped in the bar; he could actually feel it, along with a dozen pairs of eyes, none of which felt overly friendly. "Uh, what did I say?"  
  
Helga pointed to a circular wooden table close by, and said, "Park it here, kiddo."  
  
Kiddo? Well, he didn't know how much older Helga was than him. She looked maybe twenties or thirties, but with demons - and a green skinned one at that - how the hell did you tell? He looked around nervously as he crossed the room, wondering why everyone suddenly hated him, and took a seat so his back was to the wall, just in case. Helga straddled her chair, leaning her forearms on the stained table, and whispered, "Angel's kind of a bad word around town. You don't want to mention it in mixed company."  
  
"Oh, I see. I thought he was one of the good guys."  
  
"Yeah, mostly. Which is why you don't want to mention him."  
  
"Huh?"  
  
She sighed wearily, tail flicking behind her like a cat's. "Some see him as a traitor. Others, well … more likely than not related to or friends with a demon he's killed. He's killed a lot of demons. He's not looked on favorably in the demon community."  
  
"Oh." That should have seemed self-evident, and Brendan suddenly felt like a massive idiot. "Do you hate him?"  
  
"No. I could take him if I wanted. He's just a vampire. Old, but still, just a vamp. Besides. He's a friend of Logan's, and he'd probably be pissed if I dusted him."  
  
Brendan tried to recall what he knew about Helga. It wasn't much. Bob brought her in to help with that big multi-dimensional fight a while back (when Matt was still alive), and she and Scott were the only two to return from their group of four, and they were both pretty banged up. Logan's friend Marcus seemed to know her, as did Logan himself - Angel and Wesley gave that impression too, but never remarked on it. He also got the impression she was Bob's girlfriend, but he wasn't completely sure. Scott didn't seem to like her, which was probably a plus in her favor. "You're friends with Logan too, huh?"  
  
"That's one way to put it."  
  
Did he want to know? Could he guess? Suddenly he wondered what it would be like, sleeping with someone with a tail, and then he realized he would get seriously sidetracked if he kept thinking like that. "Um, uh, I came here to talk to Bob, actually."  
  
"In that case, you're out of luck. He's off taking care of something somewhere else."  
  
He raised his eyebrows at that. "Could you vague that up a little more?"  
  
"Hey, he is. It's some kind of higher powered stuff. I know better than to ask now, 'cause seriously, I don't want to know."  
  
"Oh." In a way, he was relieved, because something about Bob was a little scary. Hot, but scary.   
  
"What did ya wanna talk to him about?"  
  
He didn't know if he should tell her. How could she help him? But then again, who else could he go to? He was kind of stuck here. "I was wonderin' … I've kinda been kicked out."  
  
"From where? The mutant school?"  
  
"No, I just had to get away, after …" He couldn't say it. Fuck him, he couldn't even think about it without tearing up. So in an attempt to salvage some dignity, he just said, "I had to get outta there. I'm not good with schools."  
  
"I hear ya. So Logan sent you out here?" She gave him a curious look, like she suspected he was lying to her.  
  
"Yeah. He thought Angel could set me up with a place to stay until I got my shit together. And he did … for a little bit. Now Wesley's told me I really oughta go back to New York, 'cause it's not safe here."  
  
That made her sit up a little. Wow, she had really great - and really green - boobs. She was kind of pretty … well, for a green chick. "Was he at all specific on why? 'Cause this is L.A. - it's never safe here. Especially during pilot filming season."  
  
He guessed that last bit was a joke, but she seemed serious. "No, he didn't really say, just said there were some "bad things" happening, and they weren't sure t hey could protect me. I told them I could protect myself, but he muttered something about no more innocents dying - or maybe it was insects. He really did mutter. And my god, he looked like shit! That's what really convinced me and freaked me out."  
  
She rolled her shoulders, a kind of shrug. "Well, he ain't my type, but I know some people who think he's attractive -"  
  
"No, I mean, he really looks like shit. Like he hasn't slept for days, and I swear he had booze exuding from his pores. He wasn't drunk, but he seemed a little … freaky."  
  
That really seemed to surprise her. Even her tail stopped twitching. "Holy shit. The unflappable Wes finally flapped? It must be bad." She paused briefly. "Bob has said there was some bad shit going down, but there usually is somewhere." She rubbed her forehead, tail briefly flicking in impatience. "Oh god, not another apocalypse. This is so old."  
  
He just assumed that was a joke, or at least hoped it was. "He wouldn't tell me what was going on … I told him I wasn't helpless. I can fight." She snorted, as if in derision, making him scowl. "Hey, I can. I'm not as fragile as a normal Human. And Logan said I fought well."  
  
She grimaced in a painful way, like she was trying not to laugh. "Hon, I'm sure you do. But you know he meant that in a "for a kid" way."  
  
"How the hell would you know that?" He snapped, hating this part. Everybody always treated him like a kid, and he couldn't remember the last time he was a kid. It was so fucking unfair.  
  
She shook her head, and said, "Be honest here - could you last one minute in a fight with Logan? I'm not askin' if you could take him, just if you could last sixty seconds."  
  
He just stared at her, not even considering lying, as even he couldn't make himself buy it. "Is running and hiding an option?"  
  
"No."  
  
"That's not a fair question, you know."  
  
"Oh no? The world is full of things bigger and badder than him, especially when an apocalypse rolls around. Shit, you were there for the Berserkers, weren't you?"  
  
"Yeah, but I thought those were inter-dimensional beasts or something. I mean, there's no way things like that can plod around in this dimension, is there? People would see them."  
  
"Kid, Berserkers have a tendency to eat any Human they find."  
  
"Oh." He could see how that would help stay incognito. "Well, what about you? Could you last sixty seconds with Logan?"  
  
"I've lasted longer than -" Suddenly she stopped, and looked slightly embarrassed, and he wondered what she had been about to say. Did he really want to know? " Yeah, easy, sixty seconds. Of course, with those fucking claws of his, he'd probably win eventually, but I could do at least sixty. " She suddenly looked towards the back of the room, and shouted, "Hey! You get the fuck away from the jukebox, Thrak! Or I'm flushin' you down the toilet again."  
  
To Brendan's disbelief, she was addressing the man sized pile of slime, that oozed away from the jukebox like … well, like a big oozy thing. "That's alive?"  
  
"In a manner of speaking, yeah. He's an Igg demon."  
  
"Ick?"  
  
"No, Igg. But he is pretty icky."  
  
Maybe it was the lighting - this was a pretty poorly lit bar - but it looked like he left a glistening trail on the floor, like a slug. Oh gross! And when it moved, it made a noise like someone in rubber boots slogging through Jello. And he thought the Berserkers had been bad.   
  
When Helga turned back to him, she had a resolute look on her face, like she was determined to just get this conversation over with. "Okay, I'm gonna assume your parents are out of the picture. What do you wanna do, kid? I mean, you gotta have some goal, some dream. Wanna be in a band?"  
  
"I have no talent."  
  
"So? When does that stop anyone? Have you seen that American Idol show? Talent's an impediment to marketing."  
  
"I don't want to be a musician. I don't know what I want to do. I've spent my whole life just getting through the day, y' know? One day at a time, like a twelve stepper, only I wasn't trying to shake a habit, just survive. I don't know how to think into the future, not in a realistic way. Maybe I got A.D.D. or something."  
  
"Naw, you're just a kid who didn't have the easiest life. I was kinda like you too, aimless, no idea what I was gonna do when I grew up."  
  
"And you came to own a bar?"  
  
"Nu-uh, this is really Bob's bar. I'm just holding down the fort 'til he gets back. No, I became an assassin."  
  
He waited for her to add "Just kidding" or otherwise snicker, but she never did. Was she serious? She couldn't be…although that would explain both why Bob brought her in on that whole apocalypse thing, and why Scott disliked her. And why she thought she could go a round with Logan. Shit. "Uh, I … I don't think I'm doin' the assassin thing."  
  
"Good for you. It's a limited career with little advancement." Now that had to be a joke. Right? "Wes couldn't have kicked you out on the street, no matter how flapped he was."  
  
Only after a moment did he realize that was a question. "No, but it's pretty clear they want me on the next flight to New York."  
  
"But it's not what you want - and yet, you have no real resources."  
  
"That's about it, yeah."  
  
She considered that a moment, drumming her fingers on the table (even her fingernails were a pale green - how weird was that?), and finally said, "Why don't I take you over to the Stone Temple? Rags can surely get you set up somewhere."  
  
"Rags? The celery smelling guy?"  
  
The disgust must have been evident on his face, because she said, "I know, but don't worry about it. The Stone Temple is a church - a benevolent demon church. They'll help ya, 'cause that's what these places do. It'll just be temporary, until you figure out where you wanna go. And the Gorgons are good protection if things do hit the fan; they seem to be "hands on" sorts, very protective of their followers. A good thing, if it all goes shitty."  
  
She probably had a point, but he really didn't want to end up near that Rags guy. And he wasn't a follower of the Gorgons, so wouldn't they pissed if they were all that "hands on"?   
  
Before he could mention his doubts, the door of the bar slammed open, making everyone jump. A man with red hair - a vampire, in full, wrinkly vamp face - stumbled in, almost falling, his jacket smoking like he was on fire. He wasn't, or at least he wasn't anymore, but he smelled like burning flesh, and Brendan's stomach flipped as the vamp leaned on a near by table, almost falling on top of it. "Hel … bad, bad news…" he panted, sounding like he was in pain. If he was really as burned as he smelled, it was possible.  
  
"What?" She asked, standing up and peering behind him out the still open door. There appeared to be nothing but empty, darkened L.A. street out there.  
  
"S-someone, somehow, has just brought back Kalaratri." With that dramatic announcement, his yellow eyes rolled up inside his head, and he collapsed face first onto the table, sliding off it like an oil slick, smoldering all the way.  
  
Brendan looked at her, wondering what that was about - and was that vamp a friend or something? But the look on her face stilled his voice in his throat. She looked stunned and horrified, eyes wide and jaw slack. She wasn't even seeing him anymore, just staring at a nothing point somewhere behind him. "Oh fuck," she gasped, and sounded breathless with the horror of it all. "Bob."  
  
He wasn't sure if that was a curse or a prayer. 


	13. Part 12

21  
  
It was really hard to do your job when you were carrying a half dead guy over your shoulder. A heavy half dead guy on top of that. But it wasn't like he could hand Logan off to someone else - who else could press three hundred pounds?  
  
But Hover was hovering around (so to speak), and was able to confirm that the airstrip looked clear before Yukio brought the chopper down. It seemed like a clear shot (oh, not a good term) to Tony's jet, but as he made his way across the tarmac, he had a gun in his free hand, safety off an ready to fire. The bad thing about a private airstrip was you had to look everywhere at once, which he tried to do, but he knew he did a piss poor job. Still, no one shot at Tony as they reached the jet.  
  
Once inside, he went to the back cabin where there were retractable beds, and waited for one to fully emerge from its hiding place in the bulkhead as Tony lingered in the doorway, looking nervous, guilty, and useless. Tony hadn't totally done what he came here for, but fuck it - he was aborting the job. Logan was just too fucked up - everything was too fucked up - and he was calling it; it was over. He wasn't sure if his entire association with Tagawa was over too; he hadn't made up his mind yet.  
  
He put Logan down on the bed, as carefully as Humanly possible, which wasn't that gentle at all. But he didn't seem to care. He couldn't be more out if he was in a coma (a possibility that had occurred to him). He seemed to be healing, as he couldn't see the slice of metal rib anymore, but that was it : he was still marked with cuts and bullet holes, and blood still seeped from a couple of them. Also, you could still use him to boil water, if you were so inclined.  
  
"I never meant for it to get this bad," Tony said, once again making an excuse. "Is there anything I can do to help?"  
  
"Stop the fucking mind games," he snapped. Looking down, he noticed Logan had bled all over him. Shit. He wondered if he could take his dry cleaning bills out of his payment. Would Logan even notice? It wasn't like he counted the money.  
  
"I apologize. I'm just accustomed to keeping my own council."  
  
"When you hire us, we're in on the council - clear?"  
  
He nodded, still chagrined and small. As he should be. But he wasn't sure he could storm out in a huff, even when they landed in Canada, and even if Logan was okay and back to normal.  
  
Because the gangsters probably weren't done with any of them, and anodyne, whatever it really was. And now all the Yakuza knew Logan was still alive.   
  
He was going to venture out on a limb and guess that wasn't a good thing.  
  
Although it might be considered bad form, his guest didn't mind if he turned the back of his chair on him during their negotiations. In fact, he was often relieved, as it meant he could peel away some of the veils that he used to cover himself, to shelter the world from his "condition". And Sanjiro could still watch his reflection in the window, if he so desired.  
  
Nakamura burst in, apparently unaware he had company. "Sir, the helicopter Woo secured for us was spotted on its way to the airfi-" he stopped so abruptly, he knew the young man had just seen his guest. "Uh, um, a thousand pardons. I- I didn't realize -"  
  
"Did Tagawa get away?" He said, staring at Nakamura's reddening expression in the window. It was partially embarrassment, and partially fear.   
  
"Um, uh, y-yes, it seems so. Early reports have them all getting away. We're still uncertain as to how the helicopter was secured -"  
  
"Logan Yashida," he snapped, swiveling his chair around to face his aide. Nakamura was subtly edging towards the door, as far from his guest as possible. "The Triad fucked up. Did they not read the reports we were able to secure? He is a freak capable of astounding acts of violence. Or was the slaughter of two well armed families just not enough evidence for them?"  
  
It was pointless to lash out at Nakamura, as it was hardly his fault - it was the Triad who screwed up, who were so damn sure they could recover him they got cocky. (What a shock.) But the Triad weren't here, so Masao would just have to do.  
  
"I-uh … the Triad reports several dead operatives, and others missing -"  
  
"I'm sure they do. Well, if they're heading back to Canada, we still have an operative in play."  
  
"We do?"  
  
He fixed him with a glare that would have meant death if he was anyone else. "Our friendly neighborhood bomber. Perhaps he can intercept them at the airport, have a "welcome home" present waiting for them." Not that that would take care of the Logan problem, but that was okay ; that was something he wanted to do himself anyways. That animal had robbed his name of prestige, of honor, of power - no one got away with that so lightly. He had worked too hard to restore his name, and no gaijin freak was going to tarnish it further. "Well? Why are you standing there like a moron? Call him and patch him through to me at once."  
  
"Y-yes sir," he squeaked nervously, yet looked almost grateful as he fled the room. Did he find the appearance of his guest that disturbing?  
  
His guest was still wearing most of his concealing layers, hiding his unfortunate, extreme skin condition. Considering how much he hated mutants, he didn't think he was one, but he could have been. His skin was gray and layer with thick scales - when the veils and robe were off, he looked not unlike an aardvark or anteater in Human form. His eyes were storm cloud gray, matching his scales. Right now, only his eyes were visible above his dark blue veil, and his black hood covered the rest of his head. But what was visible of his skin looked like clots of dirty stucco. He said it was rare skin condition related to scleroderma, but Sanjiro didn't think so. "Will this be a problem?" The guest croaked. It always sounded like he was speaking through a mouthful of gravel. "We can offer assistance."  
  
Sanjiro made a dismissive gesture with his hand, looking back out at the water. It was hard to look directly at Farik after a while - it was like staring at the sun.( A hideously disfigured sun?) "They're just men. Easily taken care of."  
  
He was silent for a long, insulting moment. "If you say so."  
  
Swallowing a disgusted sigh, he asked, "Are the shipments ready?"  
  
"Of course. The anodyne is ready for distribution. The rest is up to you. I trust that you will not let us down, like Tagawa."  
  
"Tagawa was a fool; drugs addled his mind. If he hadn't died, we'd have killed him anyways." He didn't trust Farik - how could he? - but he really didn't need to. Anodyne was a gold mine, a fortune waiting to be made, and it would be his. Theirs.  
  
And if Farik didn't exactly live to see it … well, accidents happened, didn't they?   
  
It was a dangerous world. For some more than others.  
  
22  
  
Bob sat on the stairs inside his Sydney house, wondering why no one had figured out that Murphy's Law was a universal constant. Everything that could go wrong generally did, and with such frequency that he didn't know why people hadn't woken up to that fact yet. Also, the road to several hells was paved with good intentions, but they were also paved with bad ones. Sometimes there was no way to win.  
  
He knew by slightly de-powering Jean, he'd made her hate him more. It couldn't be helped, but he knew he would probably pay for this somewhere down the road. He just hoped she didn't take it out on Logan.  
  
The phone started to ring, and the noise startled him. It was too damn quiet here, that was the problem. With a thought, he turned his stereo on, and just let the phone ring. It could go to call messaging - he just didn't feel like talking to anyone at the moment.   
  
But the CD that came up was loud, so he skipped it ahead to a mellower track, wondering why he couldn't bear silence right now. Maybe not thinking was good - sometimes it was better just to be on auto-pilot.  
  
He'd have to talk to Logan before Jean got in contact with him. Gods knew what she would tell him … but would he understand the truth? If Jean claimed he hurt her, Logan would strike out - of course he would. Bob would too, given the same circumstances. Goddess or not, you still felt some strange, macho imperative to "protect" the woman you loved, even when she didn't need it. "Say hello to everything you left behind," he sang, resting his face in his hands. He did good, he knew he did - so why did he feel so shitty? "It's even more a part of your life now that you can't touch it."  
  
And that's when the atmosphere shifted, and he felt a sickening, lurching feeling in his gut. Oh no - oh hell no.  
  
He looked up, and saw Kali standing in his living room. She looked like she was made of night: midnight black, with familiar constellations of stars on her limbs, spread across her abdomen and breasts, only distorting slightly upon her face, where her mouth and her eyes - two white/silver discs, like full moons on the horizon - broke up the flow. She was long and lean, her face so slender it was almost elongated, and reminded him vaguely of ancient Nefertiti busts - or Edvard Munch's "The Scream", but not so ugly or anguished. No, he wasn't sure she even knew what anguish meant. "Hello, lover," she said with cheerful malevolence. When she opened her mouth, you could see she glowed yellow inside, like she had swallowed the sun.  
  
He could have erected some kind of field against her, but nothing he could conjure up would last long. Even if he wasn't slightly depowered himself, Kali was always strong enough to wipe out Powers. That's why she ended up the way she did. "Let me guess - you didn't claw your way out of the Underworld to invite me to tea." Her power seemed to crawl along his skin like statically charged insects. He now wondered if that ringing phone was someone trying to warn him she was back. Not that it would do any good at all, but just the thought was nice.  
  
She smiled, in her way, but it was as sharp and cold as a knife. Perhaps this was instant karma. "You know what your biggest problem always was, Bob? You talked too much." And with that, she made a flicking gesture with one long, thin hand, as if swatting a fly.  
  
He felt the power hit him square in the chest, a battering ram with megaton force, and then he didn't feel anything at all.  
  
One thing you could say about letting Rags teleport you somewhere - as bad as it could be, it was still usually better than flying Delta.  
  
Helga did her best to keep that in mind as reality reform around them, spitting them out and making them stumble around the living room like drunks on a waterbed. "I don't know wha' it is," Rags said, steadying himself by grabbing the back of the nearest sofa. "Teleportin' to Australia is always hard."  
  
"Maybe Ammy did something when she was in a bad mood," she suggested, waiting to see if her stomach was going to complete the journey up her throat, or settle back down. It settled down. "Bob, you here?" She shouted, knowing instantly it was a stupid question: the stereo was playing, A Perfect Circle, so hell yes Bob was here.  
  
That instantly annoyed here, though. Why didn't he pick up the goddamn phone if he was back now?   
  
"Oh," Rags said, making it sound like two syllables. "This ifn't good."  
  
Whenever his Cockney accent grew more pronounced, it was bad enough. What was worse was the smell in the air, like burned flesh and ozone, and a feeling like ... well, she didn't know. It just made her skin prickle, like lightning was about to strike. Rags must have felt it too. "No kidding."  
  
"I fink we should go."  
  
"Without Bob? Fuck you." She glanced in the kitchen, saw nothing, and headed for the stairs. "Goddamn it, old man, you'd better -" She stopped dead when she came around to see what was laying at the bottom of the staircase.  
  
"What is it?" Rags asked, his anxiety palpable. He was about a second away from doing a runner.  
  
What it was was a hand, that led right back into the rest of Bob, who was laying on the floor in a rough half-circle, curled up as if kicked hard in the stomach. "Bob," she said, quickly crouching down beside him, hoping he was just being funny.  
  
But he wasn't. He was all dead weight, body as loose as a rag doll's, with something curious on his chest. It was an odd symbol, kind of like the Greek symbol for rho interposed with a curly cue, and it had burnt through his shirt and into his torso, through several layers of skin. It was both a brand and a tattoo, and when she touched it, she immediately had to pull her hand away. It was like the symbol was trying to rip the energy right out of her.  
  
She heard Rags come around, keeping a cautious distance, and finally he asked, "Is he alive?"  
  
And she didn't know how to answer that.  
  
To Be Continued..... 


End file.
